Whatever the weather is wherever you are, here’s some lovely music and beautiful flowers for a perfect summer day.

Happy 134th Birthday to Percy Grainger, born in this day, July 8, in 1882 in Melbourne, Australia. The music is his Country Gardens.

Planting the Meadow

by Mary Makofske

I leave the formal garden of schedules
where hours hedge me, clip the errant sprigs
of thought, and day after day, a boxwood
topiary hunt chases a green fox
never caught. No voice calls me to order
as I enter a dream of meadow, kneel
to earth and, moving east to west, second
the motion only of the sun. I plant
frail seedlings in the unplowed field, trusting
the wildness hidden in their hearts. Spring light
sprawls across false indigo and hyssop,
daisies, flax. Clouds form, dissolve, withhold
or promise rain. In time, outside of time,
the unkempt afternoons fill up with flowers.

“Planting the Meadow” was originally published in the May 2001 issue of Poetry magazine
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/detail/41192