Painting by Jeannie Hunt
SANDRA LYNN HUTCHISON
Advice to a Daughter
Hold fast to growing things! Study resilient roots
that dream through winter storms,
Survive the bitter winds.
Anything washed by rain is clean, unstained.
Catch it in your net. Plant it. Watch it bud,
Its leaves unfurl in early spring.
Time grows, too, and blueberries thrive in scrub
and stone, where on the blood-colored rock
you found a home, your first under the moon.
Seaweed, you might think it homely as a weed,
Like dandelion growth, overabundant, untamed,
A thing you cannot love. Just touch it.
The touch of a thing furnishes the mind with food
and drink. Never forget trees — faithful lovers
they abide with you until the end.
Wait for a big wind to blow away your sadness
as you lie in the cradling grass alone,
Nothing but clouds to take you home.
A bird is the best guide. Ever frugal, it uses
ordinary things — a blade of grass, a leaf,
As it calls to its mate to come join the feast.
A garden is a well of joy. Dive in. Planting,
a straight path to follow without fear.
Hold fast to growing things!
A green world thrives where friends stand,
hands uplifted, fingers intertwined,
Twin branches reaching to the sky.
Her stories have been anthologized in a variety of publications, including Chinese Ink, Western Pen: The Oxford Anthology of Stories About China (Oxford U. Press, 2000). She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in English literature and has been the recipient of various academic and literary awards, including a Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship, an Emily Dickinson Poetry Prize from Universities West Press and a Jane Kenyon Poetry Scholarship from Bennington College, where she did work towards an MFA in Poetry.
She lives and teaches in Orono, Maine, where she is working on a memoir and a novel.