Question and Answer (after Li Po)

 

You ask me

why I live on 

this green mountain.

                  I smile: no answer.

Come.

Live here

forty years.

             You'll see.

--David Budbill

[Photo of our daughter's potting bench in Vermont, June 2025].

Forty-Five Years Together

 

Forty-five years together.

Good times and bad.

In love and out.

Yet always persevering.

Tenacity and grit

are underrated.

Why not praise them, too?

Together to the end.

It is evening.

This is a love poem.

--David Budbill, from Happy Life

What is June Anyway?

After three weeks of hot weather and drought,

           we've had a week of cold and rain,

just the way it ought to be here in the north,

            in June, a fire going in the woodstove

all day long, so you can go outside in the cold

            and rain anytime and smell

the wood smoke in the air.

 

This is the way I love it. This is why

           I came here almost

fifty years ago. What is June anyway

          without cold and rain

and a fire going in the stove all day?

--David Budbill

[Another cool and wet June day in Vermont].

Little Poem Written at Five O'Clock in the Morning

 

All this violence:  wars and cruelties--
collective and individual--
carnage of all kinds,
now as always
back to the beginning of time.

Our kind endlessly slaughters itself;
our appetite for self-destruction is boundless.

Yet and still every day the sun rises,
white clouds roll across the sky,
vegetables get planted and grow,
and late in the afternoon someone
sits quietly with a cup of tea.

--David Budbill

The Heart of Evening

 

Day over.  Wind gone.

No sound but

an owl far away.

Let my careworn heart

take refuge

in the heart of evening.

--David Budbill

This Morning

 

Oh, this life,

the now,

this morning,

which I 

can turn

into forever

by simply loving

what is here,

is gone by noon.

--David Budbill

Sometimes

Sometimes when day after day we have cloudless blue skies,
warm temperatures, colorful trees and brilliant sun, when
it seems like all this will go on forever,

when I harvest vegetables from the garden all day,
then drink tea and doze in the late afternoon sun,
and in the evening one night make pickled beets
and green tomato chutney, the next red tomato chutney,
and the day after that pick the fruits of my arbor
and make grape jam,

when we walk in the woods every evening over fallen leaves,
through yellow light, when nights are cool, and days warm,

when I am so happy I am afraid I might explode or disappear
or somehow be taken away from all this,

at those times when I feel so happy, so good, so alive, so in love
with the world, with my own sensuous, beautiful life, suddenly

I think about all the suffering and pain in the world, the agony
and dying. I think about all those people being tortured, right now,
in my name. But I still feel happy and good, alive and in love with
the world and with my lucky, guilty, sensuous, beautiful life because,

I know in the next minute or tomorrow all this may be
taken from me, and therefore I've got to say, right now,
what I feel and know and see, I've got to say, right now,
how beautiful and sweet this world can be.

--David Budbill

[Photo from Wallingford, VT]