Thursday Poem - Don't wait for something beautiful to find you.

Go out into the weather-beaten world

where straw men lean on frozen fields

and find the cardinal's scarlet flash of wing,

a winter heart, a feathered hope.

Without a camera or a memory,

we travel these old country roads,

turn corners like the pages of a book,

enchanted by the ordinary life

of fields and rocks and woods,

of small wild creatures stirring in the brush.

We take home pockets full of myths

and wonders seldom seen.

We will not give up easily.

Across the breakfast table

in our precarious nest,

we make those promises keep on going

that no one ever keeps. And yet...

there is the cardinal again,

a finial on our old gray fence.

Red is for Valentines.

Dolores Stewart (Riccio) 

This morning's poem is reprinted with permission from the late Dolores Stewart Riccio's exquisite volume of poetry, The Nature of Things. She was my friend, and I miss her.