Emily Blair Stribling

Family Threads

It is extravagant, I know,
the big vase of blue hydrangea and lavender phlox
for just the two of us.

All summer this house has been full of children,
the fragrance of small voices wafting through its rooms,
sea-shells, and painted rocks, small tokens of wonder.

We gathered as one family,
three generations from two to seventy-two,
all pulling up chairs to the old table,
all talking at once, all hungry to be fed,
sometimes accepting, other times rejecting
all that we are and we aren’t.

We make no more, no less of how children and grandchildren
refuse to let us help them tie their shoes,
or build a castle or find a job.

For these few weeks we return to where it all began,
the fireflies, the picnics, swimming,
wine on the porch, lobsters and peach pie,
and shooting stars that from birth
lured this family back to do it all again and again.

Now it is just the two of us here in the old farmhouse,
caretaking memories as a new season begins
to tell a new story about the blessing of seeds
and dying leaves the wind whips and swirls.

We light the fire, pour the wine,
a prayer lodging between us 
for the return of the prodigal light.

Emily Blair Stribling grew up in the south but has lived most of her life in New England because she finds the seasons and the natural world is where she is most at home. For many years she lived on a farm in Maine with a host of goats, chickens and family. She recently moved to CT to be closer to children and grandchildren. Emily is a poet, a teacher, a wife, a mother, and a grandmother, still filled with wonder and hope.

Her work has appeared in numerous reviews and journals among them The New York Quarterly, Maine Farms, Poets On, Poetry Nook and NPR’s Poems From Here. One of her poems is included in the anthology, Balancing Act 2, and Finishing Line Press published her chapbook, The Mercy of Light. She is the recipient of an American Book Award and New York City’s Pen and Brush Award.