September Time

I love this poem. Ted Hughes brilliantly captures that anxious and regretful sense of September bringing an end to all the glorious summer things and time ticking on relentlessly towards a kind of reckoning. There's so much in this poem - meditations on time and memory, love ending, and aging. The last stanza is particularly brilliant, that image of the trees so forlorn and apt and visually striking.

September - Ted Hughes

We sit late, watching the dark slowly unfold:
No clock counts this.
When kisses are repeated and the arms hold
There is no telling where time is.

It is midsummer: the leaves hang big and still:
Behind the eye a star,
Under the silk of the wrist a sea, tell
Time is nowhere.

We stand; leaves have not timed the summer.
No clock now needs
Tell we have only what we remember:
Minutes uproaring with our heads

Like an unfortunate King's and his Queen's
When the senseless mob rules;
And quietly the trees casting their crowns
Into the pools.