Connie Jordan Green

Summer Solstice

++++after Arthur Smith

For one day we believe
in the high arc of the sun’s
journey, how Earth tilts
and turns, gifts her halves
with heat, one after another,
days rolling into months
into a new season, how
we stand here and know,
how beneath our feet
burrowed deep, the denizens
of Earth’s rich dark
tunnel their lives, and above
the wind whispers
through willow oak and shagbark
hickory, how this world whirrs,
its music neither lullaby
nor waltz, always overture.

Connie Jordan Green

lives with her husband and several cats and dogs on a farm in Loudon County, Tennessee. She writes a newspaper column, poetry, and young adult novels (The War at Home and Emmy). She has two chapbooks, Slow Children Playing and Regret Comes to Tea, both from Finishing Line Press, and two full-length collections: Household Inventory, winner of the Brick Road Poetry Press Award, and Darwin's Breath.