Samhain

Samhain - Annie Finch

 

(The Celtic Halloween)

 

In the season leaves should love,

since it gives them leave to move

through the wind, towards the ground

they were watching while they hung,

legend says there is a seam

stitching darkness like a name.

Now when dying grasses veil

earth from the sky in one last pale

wave, as autumn dies to bring

winter back, and then the spring,

we who die ourselves can peel

back another kind of veil

that hangs among us like thick smoke.

Tonight at last I feel it shake.

I feel the nights stretching away

thousands long behind the days

till they reach the darkness where

all of me is ancestor.

I move my hand and feel a touch

move with me, and when I brush

my own mind across another,

I am with my mother's mother.

Sure as footsteps in my waiting

self, I find her, and she brings

arms that carry answers for me,

intimate, a waiting bounty.

"Carry me." She leaves this trail

through a shudder of the veil,

and leaves, like amber where she stays,

a gift for her perpetual gaze.

Halloween Mask

The scariest thing of all? Not demons, but human nature.

 
Empire of Dreams  - Charles Simic 

On the first page of my dreambook

It’s always evening

In an occupied country.   

Hour before the curfew.   

A small provincial city.   

The houses all dark.

The storefronts gutted.

I am on a street corner   

Where I shouldn’t be.   

Alone and coatless

I have gone out to look

For a black dog who answers to my whistle.   

I have a kind of Halloween mask

Which I am afraid to put on.

The Haunted Chamber

  

'Each heart has its haunted chamber...'

Perhaps the most haunting thing of all - the ghosts we keep in our own hearts.


The Haunted Chamber - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Each heart has its haunted chamber,
  Where the silent moonlight falls!
On the floor are mysterious footsteps,
  There are whispers along the walls!

And mine at times is haunted
  By phantoms of the Past
As motionless as shadows
  By the silent moonlight cast.

A form sits by the window,
  That is not seen by day,
For as soon as the dawn approaches
  It vanishes away.

It sits there in the moonlight
  Itself as pale and still,
And points with its airy finger
  Across the window-sill.

Without before the window,
  There stands a gloomy pine,
Whose boughs wave upward and downward
  As wave these thoughts of mine.

And underneath its branches
  Is the grave of a little child,
Who died upon life's threshold,
  And never wept nor smiled.

What are ye, O pallid phantoms!
  That haunt my troubled brain?
That vanish when day approaches,
  And at night return again?

What are ye, O pallid phantoms!
  But the statues without breath,
That stand on the bridge overarching
  The silent river of death?

Bluebeard

 

A short and sharp take on the Bluebeard story by Sylvia Plath. 

Bluebeard - Sylvia Plath

I am sending back the key
that let me into bluebeard’s study;
because he would make love to me
I am sending back the key;
in his eye’s darkroom I can see
my X-rayed heart, dissected body:
I am sending back the key
that let me into bluebeard’s study.

Incantation

It's almost Halloween... when the 'witchery' of autumn is in plain sight. 

from Incantation - George Parsons Lathrop

When the leaves, by thousands thinned,
A thousand times have whirled in the wind,
And the moon, with hollow cheek,
Staring from her hollow height,
Consolation seems to seek
From the dim, reechoing night;
And the fog-streaks dead and white
Lie like ghosts of lost delight
O’er highest earth and lowest sky;
Then, Autumn, work thy witchery!

After the Storm

May Perpetual Light Shine - Patricia Spears Jones

We have encountered storms 

Perfect in their drench and wreck

 

Each of us bears an ornament of grief

A ring, a notebook, a ticket torn, scar

It is how humans know their kind—

 

What is known as love, what can become  

the heart’s food stored away for some future

Famine

 

Love remains a jewel in the hand, guarded

Shared fragments of earth & air   drift & despair.

 

We ponder what patterns matter other than moons and tides:

musical beats—rumba or waltz or cha cha cha

cosmic waves like batons furiously twirling

colors proclaiming sparkle of darkness

as those we love begin to delight

in the stars embracing

 

Storm Warnings

We are currently in the middle of a hurricane in Ireland. (Ireland!)

Stormy weather always makes me think of this poem.

Storm Warnings - Adrienne Rich

The glass has been falling all the afternoon,
And knowing better than the instrument
What winds are walking overhead, what zone
Of grey unrest is moving across the land,
I leave the book upon a pillowed chair
And walk from window to closed window, watching
Boughs strain against the sky

And think again, as often when the air
Moves inward toward a silent core of waiting,
How with a single purpose time has traveled
By secret currents of the undiscerned
Into this polar realm. Weather abroad
And weather in the heart alike come on
Regardless of prediction.

Between foreseeing and averting change
Lies all the mastery of elements
Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter.
Time in the hand is not control of time,
Nor shattered fragments of an instrument
A proof against the wind; the wind will rise,
We can only close the shutters.

I draw the curtains as the sky goes black
And set a match to candles sheathed in glass
Against the keyhole draught, the insistent whine
Of weather through the unsealed aperture.
This is our sole defense against the season;
These are the things we have learned to do
Who live in troubled regions.

Night

It Is Difficult to Speak of the Night  - Jack Gilbert

It is difficult to speak of the night.
It is the other time. Not
an absence of day.
But where there are no flowers
to turn away into.
There is only this dark
and the familiar place of my body.
And the voices calling out
of me for love.
This is not the night of the young:
their simple midnight of fear.
Nor the later place to employ.
This dark is a major nation.
I turn to it at forty
and find the night in flood.
Find the dark deployed in process.
Clotted in parts, in parts
flowing with lights.
The voices still keen of the divorce
we are born into.
But they are farther off,
and do not interest me.
I am forty, and it is different.
Suddenly in mid passage
I come into myself. I leaf
gigantically. An empire yields
unexpectedly: cities, summer forests,
satrapies, horses.
A solitude: an enormity.
Thank god.

Grief

For the week that's in it. 


Grief - Raymond Carver

Woke up early this morning and from my bed
looked far across the Strait to see
a small boat moving through the choppy water,
a single running light on. Remembered
my friend who used to shout
his dead wife’s name from hilltops
around Perugia. Who set a plate
for her at his simple table long after
she was gone. And opened the windows
so she could have fresh air. Such display
I found embarrassing. So did his other
friends. I couldn’t see it.
Not until this morning.

October, Daphne's Month

'Autumn Goddess' by Moon Dreamer

Posted this one before, but it's so beautiful it merits a reposting. 

October - Linda Pastan

How suddenly

the woods

have turned

again. I feel

like Daphne, standing

with my arms

outstretched

to the season,

overtaken

by color, crowned

with the hammered gold

of leaves.

Letter in October

A Letter in October - Ted Kooser

Dawn comes later and later now, 

and I, who only a month ago 

could sit with coffee every morning 

watching the light walk down the hill 

to the edge of the pond and place 

a doe there, shyly drinking, 

then see the light step out upon 

the water, sowing reflections 

to either side—a garden 

of trees that grew as if by magic— 

now see no more than my face, 

mirrored by darkness, pale and odd, 

startled by time. While I slept, 

night in its thick winter jacket 

bridled the doe with a twist 

of wet leaves and led her away, 

then brought its black horse with harness 

that creaked like a cricket, and turned 

the water garden under. I woke, 

and at the waiting window found 

the curtains open to my open face; 

beyond me, darkness. And I, 

who only wished to keep looking out, 

must now keep looking in. 

Into October

'the colors of returning...'


Into October - WS Mervin

These must be the colors of returning
the leaves darkened now but staying on
into the bronzed morning among the seed heads
and the dry stems and the umbers of October
the secret season that appears on its own
a recognition without a sound
long after the day when I stood in its light
out on the parched barrens beside a spring
all but hidden in a tangle of eglantine
and picked the bright berries made of that summer

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.

August's End

August - Lizette Woodworth Reese

No wind, no bird. The river flames like brass.
On either side, smitten as with a spell
Of silence, brood the fields. In the deep grass,
Edging the dusty roads, lie as they fell
Handfuls of shriveled leaves from tree and bush.
But ’long the orchard fence and at the gate,
Thrusting their saffron torches through the hush,
Wild lilies blaze, and bees hum soon and late.
Rust-colored the tall straggling briar, not one
Rose left. The spider sets its loom up there
Close to the roots, and spins out in the sun
A silken web from twig to twig. The air
Is full of hot rank scents. Upon the hill
Drifts the noon’s single cloud, white, glaring, still.

Personal Helicon

 

' I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.'

In remembrance.

Personal Helicon - Seamus Heaney

As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.

A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.

Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

August Rain

 

August Rain, after Haying - Jane Kenyon

Through sere trees and beheaded
grasses the slow rain falls.
Hay fills the barn; only the rake
and one empty wagon are left
in the field. In the ditches
goldenrod bends to the ground.

Even at noon the house is dark.
In my room under the eaves
I hear the steady benevolence
of water washing dust
raised by the haying
from porch and car and garden
and purified, as if tonsured.

The grass resolves to grow again,
receiving the rain to that end,
but my disordered soul thirsts
after something it cannot name.

August

 

August - Dorothy Parker

When my eyes are weeds,
And my lips are petals, spinning
Down the wind that has beginning
Where the crumpled beeches start
In a fringe of salty reeds;
When my arms are elder-bushes,
And the rangy lilac pushes
Upward, upward through my heart;

Summer, do your worst!
Light your tinsel moon, and call on
Your performing stars to fall on
Headlong through your paper sky;
Nevermore shall I be cursed
By a flushed and amorous slattern,
With her dusty laces' pattern
Trailing, as she straggles by.