-This poem reflects on the bodily truth of high summer labor, where heat and work leave their mark as part of the season’s honest fullness.
By midday every task turns warm,
the shirt clings close between the shoulders,
and salt begins its quiet trace,
along the skin beneath the sun.
The rake, the hoe, the lifted pail,
all ask a little more in heat,
while dust and light stay close as breath,
and labor learns a slower pace.
No bitterness belongs to this,
just the body marked by weather,
the honest sheen of summer work,
the cost of being fully in it.
So much of ripening asks the flesh,
not only wonder, but endurance,
to bear the weight of heat and day,
and still keep moving through the light.