(Seeds, hand-colored wood engraving by Sandy Connors,
found at sandyconnorshoneybeepress.com)
She was better known for her novels and a three-volume autobiography than for her poems, but Janet Frame once called poetry “the highest form of literature because you can have no dead wood in a poem.”
EARLY SPRING
Nothing doing
except at the foot of the stem
closest to earth
a rub of green leaf
almost in bloom;
a winter-lost bud
found, clothed again by the storm
of memory’s green dust.
~ Janet Frame (1924-2004), a novelist and poet from New Zealand, from her collection The Pocket Mirror
