Literary Hook: Poem helps us celebrate summer’s delights

By Christine Swanberg
Author and Poet

This is the time of year when gardens burst with flowers, butterflies and birds — a time to celebrate summer’s delights. Here is a poem that does just that.

Garden Pleasures

The hummingbird hovers
over ruby bergamot —
soft summer dusks.

Each day, another swallowtail
floats by, landing on pink
cone flowers and milk pods.

At the suet, a downy woodpecker
hangs upside-down,
the chickadee rightside-up.

Cottage-bound cats curl near
clumps of French lavender and
prairie grasses grown round as hay stacks.
Sparrows land on phlox.
Families of goldfinch pull out
sunflowers from feeders daily.

Butter-and-eggs bloom on wispy stalks,
and everyday for no apparent reason —
sun on lilies and black-eyed Susans.

Indigo sky at twilight —
Venus ablaze, and always
the moon in her many corsets.

This poem was first published in Mid-America Review.