Blackberry Eating

Blackberry Eating - Galway Kinnell

I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry-eating in late September.

Autumn Poem

Autumn Poems - Nikki Giovanni

the heat
you left with me
last night
still smolders
the wind catches
your scent
and refreshes
my senses

i am a leaf
falling from your tree
upon which I
was impaled

How To Be Old

How To Be Old - May Swenson 

It is easy to be young, (Everybody is,
at first.) It is not easy
to be old. It takes time.
Youth is given; age is achieved.
One must work a magic to mix with time
in order to become old.

Youth is given. One must put it away
like a doll in a closet,
take it out and play with it only 
on holidays. One must have many dresses
and dress the doll impeccably
(but not to show the doll, to keep it hidden.)

It is necessary to adore the doll,
to remember it in the dark on the ordinary
days, and every day congratulate
one's aging face in the mirror.

In time one will be very old.
In time, one's life will be accomplished.
And in time, in time, the doll–
like new, though ancient–will be found.

The Midnight Club

The Midnight Club - Mark Strand

The gifted have told us for years that they want to be loved
For what they are, that they, in whatever fullness is theirs,
Are perishable in twilight, just like us. So they work all night
In rooms that are cold and webbed with the moon’s light;
Sometimes, during the day, they lean on their cars,
And stare into the blistering valley, glassy and golden,
But mainly they sit, hunched in the dark, feet on the floor,
Hands on the table, shirts with a bloodstain over the heart.

Autumn Equinox

I love the idea of 'stillness' in this poem. Isn't the equinox  a time of stillness before the change in seasons? A moment of pause, surrender, reflection. 


Autumn Refrain - Wallace Stevens

The skreak and skritter of evening gone
And grackles gone and sorrows of the sun,
The sorrows of the sun, too, gone . . . the moon and moon,
The yellow moon of words about the nightingale
In measureless measures, not a bird for me
But the name of a bird and the name of a nameless air
I have never--shall never hear. And yet beneath
The stillness that comes to me out of this, beneath
The stillness of everything gone, and being still
Being and sitting still, something resides,
Some skreaking and skrittering residuum,
And grates these evasions of the nightingale
Though I have never--shall never hear that bird.
And the stillness is in the key, all of it is,
The stillness is all in the key of that desolate sound.

The Beautiful Changes

The season of beautiful changes: autumn.


The Beautiful Changes - Richard Wilbur

One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides   

The Queen Anne’s Lace lying like lilies 

On water; it glides 

So from the walker, it turns 

Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you   

Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes. 

The beautiful changes as a forest is changed   

By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it;   

As a mantis, arranged 

On a green leaf, grows 

Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves   

Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows. 

Your hands hold roses always in a way that says   

They are not only yours; the beautiful changes   

In such kind ways,   

Wishing ever to sunder 

Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose   

For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.

Autumn Note

My default autumn feeling.

Autumn Note - Langston Hughes

The little flowers of yesterday
Have all forgotten May.
The last gold leaf
Has turned to brown.
The last bright day is grey.
The cold of winter comes apace
And you have gone away.

Autumn Love Song

cruelly, love - ee cummings

cruelly, love

walk the autumn long;
the last flower in whose hair,
they lips are cold with songs

for which is
first to wither, to pass?
shallowness of sunlight
falls, and cruelly,
across the grass
Comes the
moon

love, walk the
autumn
love, for the last
flower in the hair withers;
thy hair is acold with
dreams,
love thou art frail

-walk the longness of autumn
smile dustily to the people,
for winter
who crookedly care.

Frog Autumn

Frog Autumn - Sylvia Plath 

Summer grows old, cold-blooded mother. 
The insects are scant, skinny. 
In these palustral homes we only 
Croak and wither. 

Mornings dissipate in somnolence. 
The sun brightens tardily 
Among the pithless reeds. Flies fail us. 
The fen sickens. 

Frost drops even the spider. Clearly 
The genius of plenitude 
Houses himself elsewhere. Our folk thin 
Lamentably. 

The Light of September

I may have posted this poem before, but it's so beautiful, I'll post again. 

To The Light of September - WS Mervin

When you are already here 

you appear to be only 

a name that tells of you 

whether you are present or not 

and for now it seems as though 

you are still summer 

still the high familiar 

endless summer 

yet with a glint 

of bronze in the chill mornings 

and the late yellow petals 

of the mullein fluttering 

on the stalks that lean 

over their broken 

shadows across the cracked ground 

but they all know 

that you have come 

the seed heads of the sage 

the whispering birds 

with nowhere to hide you 

to keep you for later 

you 

who fly with them 

you who are neither 

before nor after 

you who arrive 

with blue plums 

that have fallen through the night 

perfect in the dew

Rainy Night

One good thing about the rain - poetry.


Last Night the Rain Spoke To Me - Mary Oliver

Last night
the rain
spoke to me
slowly, saying,

what joy
to come falling
out of the brisk cloud,
to be happy again

in a new way
on the earth!
That’s what it said
as it dropped,

smelling of iron,
and vanished
like a dream of the ocean
into the branches

and the grass below.
Then it was over.
The sky cleared.
I was standing

under a tree.
The tree was a tree
with happy leaves,
and I was myself,

and there were stars in the sky
that were also themselves
at the moment,
at which moment

my right hand
was holding my left hand
which was holding the tree
which was filled with stars


and the soft rain—
imagine! imagine!
the wild and wondrous journeys
still to be ours.

Our Possible Life

 'But for those short times
we seemed to be alive...'

Going There - Jack Gilbert

The danger when we try to leave.
Going over and over afterward
what we should have done
instead of what we did.
But for those short times
we seemed to be alive. Misled,
misused, lied to and cheated,
certainly. Still, for that
little while, we visited
our possible life.

End of Summer

End of Summer - Stanley Kunitz

An agitation of the air,

A perturbation of the light

Admonished me the unloved year

Would turn on its hinge that night.

 

I stood in the disenchanted field

Amid the stubble and the stones,

Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me

The song of my marrow-bones.

 

Blue poured into summer blue,

A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,

The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew

That part of my life was over.

 

Already the iron door of the north

Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows

Order their populations forth,

And a cruel wind blows.