This week’s poem appears here offseason – it brings us to a warmer time when there’s a rainstorm after a long period of sun. The title refers to the smell after such a storm. As the poem beautifully shows us, that smell is not “attar,” an essential oil made from rose petals; it carries the scent of organic material being broken down for plants – a scent we are perhaps predisposed to love.
Richard Foerster lives in Eliot and is the author of eight collections, including “Boy on a Doorstep: New and Selected Poems,” recently published by Tiger Bark Press. His honors include two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Maine Arts Commission Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship and two Maine Literary Awards.
Petrichor
By Richard Foerster
Six storm-wet buzzards
wait among dead boughs
of an ancient pine,
their ruffs plumped like Flemish
collars to shield naked rose-pink
heads; lumpish, brown,
they hide inside themselves,
honing patience as an art.
Wrapped in windless gray,
what is resurrection to them
if not the day brightening
to its usual interplay
of shadows and light? Soon
all six will lift wide their wings,
let them hang like linens
on a line, shedding a weight
that would forestall their rise
into sun-warmed currents,
the scent they know so well,
that rich decay which we mistake
for attar and greedily inhale.
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is a poet who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2019 Richard Foerster. It appeared originally in “Boy on a Doorstep” (Tiger Bark Press, 2019) and appears here by permission of the author. For an archive of all the poems that have appeared in this column, go to pressherald.com/tag/deep-water.
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