One of Those Days by Joy Gagliano

From my Friend Joy, who lives in the country and enjoys contemplation. 

Today, the sun is out, forest and gardens freshened and damp.
A rare, late heat snap gripped our area for the last week or so.
So, last nights steady rainfall and fifteen degree drop in temperature were gifts bestowed from the nature gods. Greedily accepted.
I sit on the porch, enjoying the air, color and sunshine. As I soak in the day, I realize it it the first  day. Weather wise, of the start of fall. A semi sweet realization.
Harvest has begun, farmers, gardeners and chipmunks are gathering the summers fruits.
The smells in the air are earthy and full, leaves, some, giving up their green for gold and brown..
Others falling to decorate the mosses.
It is like early evening in the scope of the year of seasons.
On a good day, looking back  on our hours,  to see the fruits we have gathered is rewarding. Comforting.
We shall sleep well.
Yet, in the early evening, we know night is coming. The end of a glorious day, and at times, hard to leave such  a satiating day, but we have no choice, no control..which, for me, is oddly comforting.
Hoping the morrow will give us the same.. Yet knowing, the march is toward the dark night.
And must be gone thru to wake to the mornings.
I love sitting on my porch.

  ~~ Joy

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And here's another porch, in another season--the one that's coming. 

Take a moment to appreciate these golden September mornings!   ~~ Juliet

Keats's Autumn

At least one Romantic may have found a rare appreciation for the Mother in Mother Nature. In Keats's poem "To Autumn," he personifies the season as a matured friend of the sun. The imagery, scents, and sounds of Autumn are o'er-brimmed by Summer and pour from Keats's pen in sensitive and intimately familiar words. Autumn is careless, drowsy, and patient. Autumn loads vines, plumps gourds, and pauses mid-harvest to spare flowers still budding for the bees. Certainly the Seasons were traditionally given female identities, but Keats never names his Autumn's gender. Instead he introduces a force of nature, and allows the reader to fill in the picture. I'm pretty sure Autumn is a woman - a rosy, mellow, beautiful woman; I feel certain Keats agrees.

47. To Autumn SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, 5 And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, 10 For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells. 2. Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; 15 Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep, Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers: And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep Steady thy laden head across a brook; 20 Or by a cyder-press, with patient look, Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours. 3. Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,— While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, 25 And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue; Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn Among the river sallows, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; 30 Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

John Keats (1795–1821). The Poetical Works of John Keats. 1884.

http://Bartleby.com; 25 October 2011.

The Summons

Snaky necks black
Among cornshocks
Be-In of clans,
Feathered coverlet,
Mulched field
High blue above,
Walking, chatting, resting.

Some fly in,
Wings bowed
Dump speed for landing.
Some fly out,
On their way to
Lost Pangea.

As it is,
So it was.
Faithful through eons,
Through cataclysms of
Fire,
Frost,
And our slaughter,
Hearing, beyond
Man's stunted senses,
Magnetic Summons--

Fly Now,
Oh Brave Children
Of Archeopterix.




http://www.julietwaldron.com

L'autre, la même

L'autre, la même

 

Streetskin moist with rain
And you are working your dark dance
in my soul this morning
The sidewalk splays a single pine quill in my path
like a sensual challenge
reminding me of porcupines,
and wolves coursing through
heavy-lidded night
I know where you run
washing into me, pulling me,
like an ocean on long forgotten tides
and how we both fear damage
But my world turns autumn in your presence
lush and full of burgundy stillness
It is fruition we offer one another
So range with me,
and we will leap burning peaks
where they raise themselves
from ancient waters