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.
“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.”
Ina Coolbrith
Ina Donna Coolbrith, born Josephine Donna Smith on March 10, 1841, in Nauvoo, Illinois, was an important figure in the literary community of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century San Francisco. She served as the first poet laureate of California from 1915 until her death on February 29, 1928, in Berkeley, California.