Plums and Poetry

I'm savoring every moment of the stone fruit season before it is replaced by the apples and pears of fall.  Each week, I delight in sampling the variety of plums, nectarines, and peaches at the farmers market. Yesterday, it was the green plums and purple elephant heart pluots that cajoled me to bake a fruit galette for a Labor Day BBQ.  While my tart dough chilled this morning I escaped into Roger Housden's TEN POEMS TO SET YOU FREE a necessary purchased after I devoured his first book, TEN POEMS TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE. I was particularly moved my Naomi Shihab Nye's "So Much Happiness"

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.

With sadness there is something to rub against,

a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.

When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up

something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.

It doesn't need you to hold it down.

It doesn't need anything,

 Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,

and disappears when it wants to.

You are happy either way.

Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house

and now live over a quarry of noise and dust

cannot make you unhappy.

Everything has a life of its own,

it too could wake up filled with possibilities

of coffee cake and ripe peaches,

and love even the floor which needs to be swept,

the soiled linens and scratched records  . . .

Since there is no place large enough

to contain so much happiness,

you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you

into everything you touch.  You are not responsible.

You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit

for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,

and in that way, be known.