How much do I love this poem? So much that I asked a friend to read it at my wedding reception, sometime after dinner and before dessert. At another friend’s wedding, I read it to the friends and family gathered around a Texas Hill Country swimming pool, not far from where farmers set out tables along the road to sell baskets of peaches. I read it to my classmates when I graduated from yoga teacher training and to my students just out of love and joy and in the spirit of sharing. And I knew it needed to go in the Poetry Box in the summer, peach season, which just happened to be the very weeks that we were out of town. It’s the first poem put up and taken down by someone else while we were gone. I wanted to share it at just the right time. I hope someone discovered it while ripe fruit waiting on the kitchen counter.
“O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days...”
