Last night of summer
highway hum and jets muffle
the coyote’s cry.
Tag: Fall
Late summer sonnet
Late Summer’s Sun
Late summer’s sun has baked the grass to brown.
The days grow shorter with each passing day,
Soon, autumn’s chill will make the leaves fall down.
All of this aching beauty will decay.
And yet I love the shadows’ slanting trace,
The once green grain gone golden in its rows,
And how I love the lines etched in your face.
It’s funny, as love ripens how it grows.
The number of our days we do not know.
No sleeper knows if he will ever wake.
So come, let’s join above, between, below.
My dear, let’s cause our fragile clay to quake.
Let us make love as if it’s our last go.
Let us embrace like dawn will never break.
Notes:
It’s that time again to haul this old one out of the vault.
Among other things, God was the first poet. The world is full of rhyme and rhythm, image and metaphor.
In our own small, imperfect way, we just catch glimpses.
A favorite midsummer poem
I don’t know about you, but I’ve always seen the July 4th holiday as the turning point for summer.
The days have just started to get shorter. The foliage starts to brown, and even though it’s two full months before September, there is a sense that the glorious hurrah of summer will all come to an end all too soon.
“The Oven Bird” by Robert Frost says all this and more to me.
It’s just a little sonnet. Fourteen lines in all.
It’s worth a look to read the whole poem, but several of the lines are little gems that stand alone. Writing about the song of the little oven bird, Frost says:
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers,
And, just a couple of lines later,
He says the highway dust is over all.
That is a poignant, dusty image, familiar to anyone who has lived in the country. It signals that the spring rains are definitely over, and you’ve entered that long, hot stretch that ends with the on-coming fall. Time is moving ahead.
The poem wraps up with a wonderful final two lines:
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.
A good question to ask any time of year, or at any time of life.
Hometown Haiku
My dear old classmates,
so very innocent, and,
so very human.
Grief Haiku
I must turn away
All the suffering I see.
I cannot bear it.
Football and Love Haiku
If not for football
Or the women I have loved
I’d hardly know pain.
Flower Time
Flower Time
I saw you first in jonquil time,
When you were bathed in grace.
You sat aglow with fire sublime,
And golden shone your face.
I loved you first in lilac time.
A bloom I plucked for you.
I wrote you verse with song and rhyme.
I hoped you loved me too.
I kissed you first in tulip time,
It must have been a sign.
The buds and we were in our prime
When your two lips met mine.
I married you in daisy time
On summer’s longest day.
We traded rings and heard bells chime.
We pledged always to stay.
Too soon we’ve come to aster time.
The days are shorter now.
Would stealing some be such a crime?
We’ll make it right somehow.
Should we endure ’til wintertime,
The time when flowers sleep,
Dreams we’ll share of a gentler clime
Where we no more shall weep.
More poetry for fall
FALLING LEAVES LIKE LOVERS
The leaves, the leaves are gone except the oak,
Which cling to trees and rattle needlessly.
The others flame and fall for all to see.
They streak and sizzle, leaving only smoke.
But oak leaves hang as by some unseen yoke,
All browned and curled awaiting sympathy,
Or sap to course and lend vitality —
The leaves cannot perceive the sorry joke.
For spring will end the lie and they will drop,
To drift and rot and turn in time to dust.
As sure as buds will burst to make a crop
Of new, the old will flutter down — they must.
The falling leaves like lovers never stop.
It’s hardly gentle, but ’tis just, ’tis just.
Autumn Song
AUTUMN SONG
Afternoon in late September
Shows us signs we both can follow,
Shadows where there were no shadows
Days before, encroach on meadows,
Turning brittle brown and yellow.
Six o’clock’s a dying ember
Causing grown men to remember
Another fall’s disturbing echo.
When, unnoticed, fell the first leaves,
Yellow elm leave tired of sunshine?
Who suspected seeing such ease
When the first chill stunned the green vine?
Is embarrassment the reason
Sumac’s crimson hides its poison?
When was foliage last so supine?
Rainy night in mid-October
Brings the icy confirmation —
Twigs encased in shiny coffins
Clenched in cold that never softens.
Even daylight’s ministration
Alters no repose so sober
As the sleep of mid-October,
Sleep of spreading desolation
Autumn Haiku
I’ve never been one,
For wallowing in the past,
But, the falling leaves …
Poetic Champions 