The Sense of Beginning

by Neile Graham

We swallow our secrets, choke down
longing's endless summer distances.
It's the season of everything fruiting
the amplitude of apricots, pulchritude of plums
of peaches, cherries–oh, the ambition
of the season. It's planning for harvest,
thinks it can store itself for winter,
then restore our faith in new beginnings.
We trust it. Rightly. Belief is something
time has proven each spring, it proves
itself now in the juice we don't notice
dripping sweetly from our chins. We
can't help knowing something has already
blossomed here and is growing, silently,
hidden, waiting its time to burst free.
Listen, you can already hear it
rampant and rustling under our skins.

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Neile Graham's life is full of writing and writers. She is a graduate of Clarion West Writers Workshop and currently serves as their workshop director. The workshop was the inspiration for this poem. Her poetry and fiction have been published in the U.S, the U.K., and Canada. She has three full-length poetry collections, most recently Blood Memory, and a spoken word CD, She Says: Poems Selected and New. New poems have appeared this year in Interfictions, Liminality, and Through the Gate.

Photography: adapted from Two cherries, by 0x010C.