This week’s poem, Janie J. Gendron’s “Pleasure,” saturates us with the lush beauties of July and of childhood. I love the richly sultry scents, colors and sensations of this scene, and the expansive, timeless world the poem finds within just these few moments.
Gendron is a member of the York Art and Poetry group and the Maine Poets Society. She is a licensed clinical social worker with a private practice in York Harbor, and she lives in York.
Pleasure
By Janie J. Gendron
Wild plums in the backyard, my small child
fingers stained with plum juice, pulp, skin
eating like no tomorrow
there was no tomorrow then
just the waft of honeysuckle, plum blossoms
July heat, hum of bees
grass lush with ripe fallen plums
one by one crushed in my mouth
as if I swallowed sun sky tree ground,
as if I needed nothing more.
Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Pleasure,” copyright 2022 by Janie J. Gendron, appears by permission of the author.
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