Two Poems by Linda Parsons

Linda Parsons’ poems “Midsummer” and “Summers Ago” drew me like a moth to a light for the way they connect the poet's inner life with 

wonder for the natural world. In this cold season, she kindles memories of warmer times when those jewel-winged cicadas and furry moths 

wove into the tapestry of our own worlds.  

                                                                                                                                                —Suzanne 

"Midsummer" and "Summers Ago"

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Midsummer

Under the old redbud in the boulevard,

sound umbrellas our heads, lifted as to thunder,

Near oh near, they cry above us, and together,

though deaf in their midst, we speak the names

we have learned in lives brief and long. Cicada,

says my granddaughter, given by her mother.

Jarflies, I counter, word my grandmother broke

with half-runners on newsprint spread in our laps,

far, so far on that glider, that porch, those burnished

evenings. In the dying down, the four-year-old

affirms the stamp of science: ci-ca-da, not yet

surefooted in the gloaming, the papers we’ll flatten

with corn shucks, oilcan she’ll fetch for our rocking

to and fro. In the new ringing, like all deepness

wrung from pitched joy, we look and look

for the red eyes, the jewel wings, near,

          oh near in the shattered still-lit night.

  

Summers Ago

          Wings and wings

of summers ago, millers and cabbage moths

bartered for a minute more on this bright earth,

greedy hopes flung night after night at the porch

lamp. Globe heaped high, nearest their one hot

desire, thorax and antennae like the bony dead

in hunger times and war.

          To spark the new bulb,

I scoop handfuls from the socket, flutter

hundreds to nandina and spurge, wiping

my hands of silvery lives. In nervous flight

over ticking grasses, in waning incandescence,

summers past sawed a fiddle-dee-dee.

          We bargain the same,

for one day more in the sweetest arms

Brief filaments redeemed in a pool of amber,

driven ever toward the light, we batter

our constant hearts against the screen,

winter’s gray rattle circling. 

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"Midsummer" and "Summers Ago" appear in This Shaky Earth, Texas Review Press, 2016 

Both poet and playwright, Linda Parsons is an editor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. She served as poetry editor of Now & Then magazine for many years and has received literary fellowships from the Tennessee Arts Commission, as well as the Associated Writing Programs' Intro Award and the 2012 George Scarbrough Award in Poetry, among others. Parsons' poetry has appeared in journals such as The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, Asheville Poetry Review, and Shenandoah and in numerous anthologies. This Shaky Earth, published by Texas Review Press, is her fourth poetry collection. Her dramatic adaptation, Macbeth Is the New Black, co-written with Jayne Morgan, was produced at Maryville College and Western Carolina University. Her play Under the Esso Moon was selected for the Tennessee Stage Company's 2016 New Play Festival and will receive a staged reading in 2017. Parsons' work is leavened with a hunger to understand the upheavals of childhood and its growing pains, to be fed full to bursting on life's vegetable immensity, to face the passing seasons with grace, where all she knows of this black-eyed earth is perishing even as it flowers.