As we settle into mud season, this week’s poem, by Charles Brown, is a passionate paean to the mud. I love this poem’s tender, varied, and wonderfully tactile litany of the many blessings mud bestows.

Brown is a retired high school teacher and occasional poet living in Owls Head. His poems have been awarded prizes by both the Rockland and Topsham libraries and by the Belfast Poetry Festival.

Owed to Mud

Descending Giant Mountain in the Adirondacks

Of all the characters in Peanuts, Pig Pen
is most at home with happiness.
He grins through grimy streaks and

cannot read the angst written across
the jagged t-shirt of his friend. Mud
is the mother of the child’s heart; it is

where life begins the climb and must go
to find its maker. On mountain trails
it records the fraternal grid of boot prints

like day-old fossils and offers them
to the lost hiker looking for a sign.
But there will be the inevitable fall,

so pray that the deep, soft embrace
of mud wraps you in its arms and plants
a kiss on your forehead because the lips

of a rock face are hard punishment
for the sin of losing your balance.
Mud forgives; it soothes burns, stops

wounds, restores beauty to the wrinkles
of desire and spreads the word that
cleanliness isn’t the only path to heaven.

— Charles Brown

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Owed to Mud,” copyright 2025 by Charles Brown, appears by permission of the author.