Tag Archives: seasons

We still love this September poem.

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(I’m reposting this from five years ago. Every September, many, many people still find the poem below on my blog. This fall, for the first time, I am pleased to say I have acquired a purple aster to enjoy for the next couple of months, and have installed it by the front door.)

Only a few years ago did I discover this poem. Being short and packed with autumnal images, it is perfect for a busy time of year, when you don’t want to let the equinox pass unnoticed, but you are canning tomatoes or drying figs or just taking all the walks you can in the crisp air. If you don’t pay attention to the calendar or the TV, you might miss the day.

For months and years I’ve been trying off and on to confirm that its author is Edwina Hume Fallis. New things show up on Internet searches all the time, and today I have seen enough sites that are confident about attributing it to her that I will accept it. Two months ago I couldn’t find two postings of the poem where her name was even spelled right. Most places it is shared as by “Anonymous.”

In the city of Denver, Colorado, Edwina Hume Fallis is especially famous, for her teaching and writing, a toy shop she owned, and her book When Denver and I Were Young. (I did recently contact the Denver public library to see if they had a copy of the poem below in their collection about her; they did not.) She and her sister made toys to use as props in telling stories to kindergarten students, and she did write over 100 poems; maybe this one was in an anthology that is now out of print. Many women bloggers seem to have memorized it in elementary school.

I wonder if any of my readers in the Southern Hemisphere knows of a similar poem that applies to the opposite seasons down there?

SEPTEMBER

A road like brown ribbon,
A sky that is blue
A forest of green with that sky peeping through.
Asters deep purple,
A grasshopper’s call –
Today, it is Summer
Tomorrow is Fall!

-Edwina Hume Fallis

At Pippin’s in 2017, waiting for the aspens to turn.

Becoming the soil of their birth.

nature, poetry, , ,

PEONIES

The peonies, too heavy with their beauty,
slump to the ground. I had hoped
they would live forever but ever so slowly
day by day they’re becoming the soil of their birth
with a faint tang of deliquescence around them.
Next June they’ll somehow remember to come alive again,
a little trick we have or have not learned.

-Jim Harrison

Theo van Rysselberghe, White Peonies

 

The winds are soft and restless.

nature, poetry,

SIX QUATRAINS

AUTUMN
gold of amber
red of ember
brown of umber
all September

MCCOY CREEK
Over the bright shallows
now no flights of swallows.
Leaves of the sheltering willow
dangle thin and yellow.

OCTOBER
At four in the morning the west wind
moved in the leaves of the beech tree
with a long rush and patter of water,
first wave of the dark tide coming in.

SOLSTICE
On the longest night of all the year
in the forests up the hill,
the little owl spoke soft and clear
to bid the night be longer still.

THE WINDS OF MAY
are soft and restless
in their leafy garments
that rustle and sway
making every moment movement.

HAIL
The dogwood cowered under the thunder
and the lilacs burned like light itself
against the storm-black sky until the hail
whitened the grass with petals.

-Ursula K. Le Guin

Pippin Photo

Beguile us … Slow, slow!

nature, poetry, ,

OCTOBER

O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
Tomorrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know.
Release one leaf at break of day;
At noon release another leaf;
One from our trees, one far away.
Retard the sun with gentle mist;
Enchant the land with amethyst.
Slow, slow!
For the grapes’ sake, if they were all,
Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost—
For the grapes’ sake along the wall.

-Robert Frost