Sufficient

Citron, pomegranate,
     Apricot, and peach,
  Flutter of apple-blows
     Whiter than the snow,
  Filling the silence
     With their leafy speech,
  Budding and blooming
     Down row after row.

Breaths of blown spices,
     Which the meadows yield,
  Blossoms broad-petaled,
     Starry buds and small;
  Gold of the hill-sides,
     Purple of the field,
  Waft to my nostrils
     Their fragrance, one and all.

Birds in the tree-tops,
     Birds that fill the air,
  Trilling, piping, singing,
     In their merry moods, —
  Gold wing and brown wing,
     Flitting here and here,
  To the coo and chirrup
     Of their downy broods.

What grace has summer
     Better that can suit?
  What gift can autumn
     Bring us more to please?
  Red of blown roses,
     Mellow tints of fruit,
  Never can be fairer,
     Sweeter than are these.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on November 17, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

Subscribe to the Poem-a-Day Podcast 

  

“Sufficient” appears in Ina Donna Coolbrith’s Songs from the Golden Gate (Houghton, Mifflin, and Co., 1895), the last collection published during Coolbrith’s life. In his essay, “Ina Coolbrith’s Friendship with John Greenleaf Whittier,” author George U. Hubbard noted that American poets “Edmund Clarence Stedman called her the ‘Sappho of the Western Sea’; [and] Edward Roland Sill believed her to be ‘the most genuine singer the West has yet produced.’” A day after Coolbrith’s death, fellow Berkeley poet Charles Keeler wrote, “Ina Coolbrith was one of the great spirits of California. Through her long life she has expressed in the truest and finest sense the essence of poetry. Commencing her literary career in pioneer days she has always in her poetry maintained a pure lyrical note tinged with sadness and yet breathing a love of nature and of man.”