poetry Archives - Debra Rienstra

Third Sunday in Advent: A Sestina

These candlelit evenings, ancient hope glimmers like a gift, gleams for a moment, then falters, slips to nothing in the circling of the year, our loves still unsteady, our roots still shallow, every promise a whisper of moth’s wings and still pending.

Debra RienstraDecember 16, 2023

memoir Michigan nature poetry spirituality

Not Consumed

What does it mean, I wonder, to encounter a burning bush, flaming but not consumed, and hear nothing? Beauty manifests God, but what if God does not call your name out of the flames? Only silence. No appointment with destiny. You admire for a moment…

Debra RienstraOctober 31, 2020

dunes Michigan nature poetry

To Love Michigan in Summer

Sumac and scrubby grass, dense-leaved oaks and maples, jumbles of every possible green. Blue spruce, Douglas fir, white pines, red pines, the astonishing symmetry of jack pine trunks in a sudden stand. Dead trees like skeletons rising from swamps. Everything stubby and scruffy and sassafrassy.

Debra RienstraJuly 1, 2017

nature poetry

Japanese Autumn

Lines Composed in an Autumn Reverie, on Visiting the Japanese Garden one Friday Afternoon, October 2015. Chrysanthemums Huddled palms direct their longing west with every gust, great frond-arms and arrow-leaves jostling, clenching, splaying. Bright chrysanthemums ensconce them, basking in slanted light, steady and splendid.

Debra RienstraOctober 2, 2015

poetry

Reading The New Garden Book on the First Day of Spring: A Found Poem

Plant fruit trees in the sun. Take advantage of microclimates. Put tender plants on the south side. Plan ahead. Mistakes may not become glaring reality for years, wasting all that growth.

Debra RienstraMarch 21, 2014

poetry

Third Sunday in Advent: A Sestina

Not Consumed

To Love Michigan in Summer

Japanese Autumn

Reading The New Garden Book on the First Day of Spring: A Found Poem

Popular Posts

Recent Posts

Links

Books

Connections

Contact