Adin Thayer

 
Maybe god is this: 

sand strewn with eel grass
and morning spume,

two oystercatchers strutting 
ahead of my slow feet

until they squawk off
into the marsh and startle

a white egret who resumes
her stone still stance

near a snail shell backside up
in marsh ooze, its inside

the rose gold of some peach
still ripening in sun 

somewhere else, a shell here
and one there,

each a curved home
ready to crack and fall

into beautiful pieces.
 

Measuring Cups

Now I stack my mother’s measuring cups
by the kitchen sink.

There will always be the dent near the lip
of the small one,

and the careful line of wizened glue along a crack
in the vase she filled with peonies

when her youngest daughter married. How can I
part with what she used? 

Her life in which a cup was dropped in argument
or haste, while blueberries

waited for sugar while the children played outside.
In which glue sufficed

for the umber vase from China.  The tree forgets
a limb taken by wind,

wasps leave the leathery globe they labored to build.
I grant the given world its neutrality

but feel, as I reach, some residue in the things
that furnished that life. 

In a village far from where I live, a gourd held water
poured over rice, a spoon
 
stirred as night rose through a mud house. 
Does some woman lift

the gourd that once held seeds then water
while she played,

does she pause in wonder that it remains 
so shaped to hold the past?
 

Adin Thayer grew up in Virginia mountains and for the last 16 years has been working in Rwanda and neighboring countries in Africa.  The experiences and people she has encountered through that work also inform and inhabit her poetry.