Last week and during the summer solstice, my co-writers and I opened a second season of The Hayfield Forever with the third poem of the story.

It's called "The Apothecary's Kitchen" and its poet, the character Demod Smith, is writing about his childhood. For the first time, we learn that Demod Smith himself has a brother and that all the oblique references to Greece last year might actually mean something. The poem begins with these five lines:

"Our second summer in Greece
my brother and I were never up
to any good, Yiayia knew, but she
let us into everything,

even other people's houses. . ."

Here's the rest of the poem, along with a cover sheet memo from the local sheriff's office. : )

So the mention of Greece, two brothers, and other people's houses are, right off the bat, re-raising three themes or motifs running throughout  the first season of The Hayfield Forever (THF). 

(I like to use "season" as we like to restart our writing of posts on the first days of winter and summer for the past two years, and it sounds a bit like a TV show that was good enough to be picked up a second time around.)

I also wanted THF to start with a poem, any poem, to get us writers, readers, and characters back to THF's starting and ending points: Mysterious poetry!

So I hope readers enjoy the poem. I wrote it based on memories of my own grandparents' evocative shelves of mason jars in the kitchen or down in the farmhouse cellars of Missouri.