Elizabeth McCarthy

Carrying Seeds

Weeds and wildflowers
cry out on cold autumn days
as their dried brittle bones
are snapped underfoot.
 
Reminding us to step lightly
and look closely at the seeds
with feathers, and all the fallen
beauty returned to the earth.
 
While tenacious brown burrs
cling tight to life, as we
carry on in rambles
under the steel gray sky.



Wooden Fence

Our fence slumps
and leans,       
its white paint
peeled, faded gray with mold.
 
Every eight feet a cedar post
barely stands
on its rotting foot.
 
Yet still, it loosely embraces
 our patch of grass and trees and home.
 
Where toddlers once ran wild
to escape the confines of love
and see what else might be
beyond its invisible hold
but were stopped short by the wooden board fence
 
that kept the nightmares out
until it was time to open the gate
and let them go.
 

 
Elizabeth lives in an old farmhouse in northern Vermont with her husband where they raised two children, several generations of free roaming hens, and made numerous attempts at keeping honey bees alive through cold winters. At age fifty, she went back to school earning a Master of Arts in Teaching then taught in Vermont public schools and at the Community College of Vermont before retiring in 2018. Elizabeth turned to poetry in March of 2020, when covid closed the world down and time became a windfall for writing and joining a weekly poetry group called the Lockdown Poets of Aberdeen, Scotland.