Poems by Charlotte Melin
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Imagine Rain
by Charlotte Melin
From Canary Summer 2024
Charlotte lives on the Cannon River, which flows into the Mississippi south of the confluence with the Minnesota at Bdote Minisota, a Dakota sacred site.
Imagine velvet dark
wakes you with the light
percussive touch of
raindrops and even before
your eyes open, you smell
the earthy scent of moist
dirt, sense the spreading
green of moss,
the push of small leaves
upward that transforms
sweet soil after
a long dry season.
But that rain doesn’t come.
© Charlotte Melin
Rain in the Anthropocene
by Charlotte Melin
From Canary Summer 2022
Rain briefly breaks the drought.
I open a window to hear
the sound of its fall on
dry leaves at night, to smell
the sweet scent wafting up
from the earth, anticipating
the scant greenness that will
come in the morning.
Too little to save the crops,
to quench the wildfires,
but enough for the moment
to breathe and look for
what can potentially be salvaged—
a habitable planet for our children,
a remnant of peace
in this asymmetrical world,
where it has also just rained
for the first time in Greenland.
© Charlotte Melin
Rampant Garden
by Charlotte Melin
From Canary Summer 2024
No room for me in the garden.
Wild clematis, phlox, joe pye weed
run rampant, crowding up
next to helianthus, goldenrod,
red bee balm and daylilies.
I’m losing ground to
creeping bellflower, bindweed
and tree seedlings randomly
sowed, especially walnuts
and hackberry. If I did not know
them by sight, they’d be
nothing but weeds, yet as is,
there’s no extirpating
things you can name.
© Charlotte Melin
Solstice
by Charlotte Melin
The solstice waits
like a banked fire—
embers at sunrise,
smoldering sparks
at the sunset end of
a somber afternoon.
What do we look for
in these times,
a light-word
flaring against
the dark? Only
a string of geese
scribbles its way
across the sky.
© Charlotte Melin