It's the greening of the trees that really gets to me. Patient plotting a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us. -Ada Limon

Antonia Matthew was born in England before World War II. Her radio play, “Antonia’s Homefront” built around the letters she received from her father in Burma during WWII has recently been produced on WFHB By Richard Fish and won a Gold Award in “Hear Now Audio Fiction and Arts Festival.” She is a member of the Writers Guild of Bloomington and a student of Women Writing for Change, Bloomington, Indiana.

Welcome to the Poets Weave. I’m Romayne Rubinas Dorsey. Antonia, what poems have you brought for us today?

Taraxacum officinale

Lions tooth
Earth nail
Swine’s snow

intricate in death
glorious in heyday
tentative in emerging

did you know
those burning
tufted heads
close at midnight?

The white intricate
seed ball
is willing to be
stolen by the wind.

Soft hollow stalk
lies down silent
under the wind
its juices seeping
into the earth.

All that's seen
those lion tooth leaves
and not seen a long,
long,
tough tap root
sprouting hairs
reaching
for earth’s center

plant living
this way
that
here
there
everywhere

Dandelion

my teacher
of transitions


Evening coming on

The teaching day done
you step out the front door
to the lawn
that slopes down
to what keeps you here --
the lake.

Now at dusk, the faint glow
of the sunset makes a path
across the lake’s ripples
moved by the evening breeze
and you sit on the slope,
behind you, pines
releasing their pollen dust
into the cooling air, and watch
the rippled darken, subside, until
the lake becomes silent and calm.
The pines on the far shore
going down to the lake
disappear in the increasing darkness
which hides you too.

You, who wish to stay forever
but must leave soon,
will carry this lake in memory
and it will enter your dreams.


Unfurled

It's late March and the young oak tree outside my second-floor window is still hanging on to its brown dry leaves that crackle in the strong late-winter wind. I can't see if there are any spring buds beneath them. Will this be the spring that the tree thwarts the warm rain and softer winds of April and remains clinging to its dryness, as if sulking. Then one early morning, I look out and – the dry leaves are gone! Where they were I can see small brown-scaled buds. Each morning, before I turn on my computer, I look out of the window and each morning see that the buds are swelling, the brown scales are falling off, until one morning there are only the green leaves and every morning they are unfurling till the view from the window is full of large shiny leaves moving in the wind, or under the rain and this is all I see out of the window. Greenness.

Matisse's Studio from a photograph

Who feeds the birds, cleans out their cages, dusts the worktable on the shelves, heavy with books, straightens the pictures on the walls, wiping off the frames and the wooden floors? Who sweeps and oils them so the photographer can come in? Take this picture of the master drawing the subservient model nude and crouching?


You’ve been listening to the poetry of Antonia Matthew on the Poets Weave. I’m Romayne Rubinas Dorsey.

Antonia Matthew reads “Taraxacum officinale,” “Evening coming on,” “Unfurled,” and “Matisse’s Studio.”