TROPICS

​As temperatures rise and as we rise to greet another Summer solstice there is, of course, that inevitable push and pull toward the coast; to spread ourselves on to the white sand beaches of Santorini and Malaga, or even meander the rolling hills of Tuscany.

​We can only hope for some holiday reprieve, though notion of a local staycation appear far more likely this year. But then after this long pandemic winter, any getaway is gift enough. In the spirit of staycation fantasies, we are delighted to share these words from Ellen Bryant Voigt:

Tropics

In the still morning when you move
toward me in sleep for love,
I dream of

an island where long-stemmed cranes,
serious weather vanes,
turn slowly on one

foot. There the dragonfly folds
his mica wings and rides
the tall reed

close as a handle. The hippo yawns,
nods to thick pythons,
slack and drowsy, who droop down

like untied sashes
from the trees. The brash
hyenas do not cackle

and run but lie with their paws
on their heads like dogs.
The lazy crow’s caw

falls like a sigh. In the field
below, the fat moles build
their dull passage with an old

instinct that needs
no light or waking; its slow beat
turns the hand in sleep

as we turn toward each other
in the ripe air of summer,
before the change of weather,

before the heavy drop
of the apples.


Here Voigt speaks to the great imaginative power in us all; to reach back into that most sublime corner of our being and make of it a paradise. Even as the poem sets us in bed we’re free, soaring over some enchanted landscape alongside our speaker and given over to another world so far removed from the here and now. Take comfort in your resilience, and in the mind’s ability to bring those white sand beaches home.​