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Mary Ann Dimand
THE GIFT OF YES
Open the doors and invite the breeze, thick with apple blossom and manure!
There is nothing that is not growing, nothing that dares
not to flower. Frozen worms are waking, stirring, moving toward a dance.
Let’s go to the orchard where the bees are buzzing heavy,
where plums curve shyly in the coolness from the leaves.
Sleepy time ripens us. Warm ears unfold to sighs
of grasses parching, grains crackling toward completion.
And now’s the time for harvest, swinging scythe, wheeling combine,
bowing, rising, gathering—potatoes for the cellar, apples
for the attic, napa to be spiced and soaked for pickling, exhausted
stems and leaves and branches to give up their last
fine nurture to the soil, to the creatures that refine and poop it.
Fire’s good, with fierceness made to match the gales,
sharp with snowflakes. Fire whispers, “Stay, dream, beware.”
Wind howls lullabies of power to urge the earth to rest, to resurrect.
And
as each season turns, our turning to and with it brings
us freshness, fullness, richness, rest—treasure that forcing
will not yield, ships of shiver and sweat brought home, to build our strength.
About the writer:
Mary Ann Dimand was born in Southern Illinois where Union North met Confederate South, and her work is shaped by kinships and conflicts: economics and theology, farming and feminism and history. Dimand holds an MA in economics from Carleton University, an MPhil from Yale University, and an MDiv from Iliff School of Theology. Some of her previous publication credits include: The History of Game Theory Volume I: From the Beginnings to 1945; The Foundations of Game Theory; and Women of Value: Feminist Essays on the History of Women in Economics, among others. Her work is published or forthcoming in A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Agave Magazine, Apricity Magazine, The Birds We Piled Loosely, Bitterzoet Magazine, The Borfski Press, The Broken Plate, Chapter House Journal, Euphony Journal, Faultline, FRiGG Magazine, From Sac, Green Hills Literary Lantern, The Hungry Chimera, Isacoustic, The MacGuffin, Mantis, Misfit Magazine, Mount Hope Magazine, Nixes Mate Review, Oddville Press, Pennsylvania English, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Penumbra, Plainsongs, RAW Journal of the Arts, Scarlet Leaf Review, Slab, Sweet Tree Review, THINK: A Journal of Poetry, Fiction, and Essays, Tulane Review, Visitant Lit, and Wrath-Bearing Tree.
Image: Fantasy-Fairytale by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885-1939). Oil on canvas. 29.3 x 59 inches. 1922. Public domain.
OJAL Art Incorporated, publishing since 2017 as OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters (O:JA&L) and its imprint Buttonhook Press, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation supporting writers and artists worldwide.
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