by Debra Rienstra
Flourish magazine, Spring 2010
Peonies
Even to think of them makes her cry,
she told me. Her great-grandfather,
a man of tenderness, grew them well
and gave them away by the armful.
Such gentle surfeit: silken charms heavy
as heartache, drooping on straining stalks;
tight fists holding their generous
splendor like birth. A dissipation of petals.
I walked through green hedges at Penshurst
in Kent, turned a blind corner into an aisle
of peonies, yards of them, thickly pink
on either side, unruly crowds of thousands.
I stood there, open-mouthed, gasping
the fragrant air as the gardener came round,
smiling at my astonishment. Every year
he presides over miracles of excess,
cutting stems down to straws in October,
raking away the litter of yellowed leaves,
knowing what will come, this keeper
of unlikely things, tender of promises
more than fulfilled.
Resilience
So first thing after they moved in
the neighbors dug up Ruth’s old garden,
a front-yard oddity that had appeared —
shaggy, extravagant, sprawling — wherever
her springtime sweat cast its charms.
The new people pulled out
her spindly jungle of asparagus; tore up
the nasturtium border whose sensuous petals,
like mangoes, you could pluck and eat;
they hacked down six-foot sunflowers;
mowed over silky native grasses that flowed
on breezy days like a woman’s hair.
The little paw-paw tree they decided to keep.
They mowed around it.
Grinning and waving at us as we strolled by,
they spent a hot September weekend
digging and seeding, laying straw,
staking off squares of flat, potential decency.
The straw muddied, winds came,
snow fell then melted, the weather warmed,
and Ruth’s earth took its revenge:
A hundred tulips shot up
in the feeble spring lawn,
raising first their cocked leaves,
then their green, defiant heads.
Debra Rienstra teaches literature and writing at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and is the author of Great with Child: On Becoming a Mother and So Much More: An Invitation to Christian Spirituality. “Resilience” was originally published in Ruminate magazine. “Peonies” was originally published in Perspectives: A Journal of Reformed Thought.
Found you looking for information about Poetry and Spirituality and writing poems in response to Scripture with Paul Willis.
I wrote a favorite poem about Peonies and included their place in history and upon Chinese plates I can see their face…as one of China’s favorite symbols of beauty… I had only studied about Peonies – grew up in Florida and then “met them face to face” while living in Kentucky: Athens of the West at one time.
I just submitted a paper this week (8/30) as part of Masters in Spirituality with Bellarmine University and Louisville Presbyterian T. Seminary titled: Reflection: Poetry and Spirituality: Getting the poem off of the page and into worship.
Before finding your topic listed in Ruminate Magazine with Paul Willis, I could not find any other writing on this topic.
I would love to take a look at what you and Paul wrote and have to say.
Lovely Poetry,
Claudia