End of Summer

 

Steven Outram

 

 End of Summer

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.

 

Stanley Kunitz

That moment when, doing something usual and ordinary, you feel it - something is happening. Something is changing.

Is it a leaving, or an arriving?

The phrase " turn on its hinge", and later, " the iron door" - you can almost hear the creak of it, feel it's coldness, it's finality - like a prison door.

Is Summer a room in Time's house? Or is it outside, and now we move inside, into the dark confines of an inhospitable cell?

"I stood in the disenchanted field". All the lovely sea-like grasses, gone. All the movement and sway shorn down to bristles. And then the realization "that part of my life was over".

Is this the season of disenchantment? And what happens when only the bones are left?

 Is it possible that there is a deeper magic? A magic beyond seasons, a meaning running through all times and places, an unswervable undefeatable unchangeable and glorious victorious beauty that transforms us?

That would melt an iron door.

Nobbut God

Elena Yushina

 

 

"First on, there was nobbut God." Genesis 1:1

 Yorkshire Dialect Translation

Nobbut God

            

First on

There was silence.

And God said:

'Let there be clatter.'

The wind, unclenching,

Runs its thumbs

Along dry bristles of Yorkshire Fog.

The mountain ousel

Oboes its one note.

After rain

Water lobelia

Drips like a tap

On the tarn's tight surface-tension.

But louder,

And every second nearer,

Like chain explosions

From furthest nebulae

Light-yearing across space:

The thudding of my own blood.

'It's nobbut me,'

Says God.

Norman Nicholson

 

 

The way he joins the sound of rain dripping off the petals of a flower and "chain explosions from furthest nebulae" with the sound of his beating heart!

 

It's a shock, the differences in scope. 

A raindrop, a heartbeat, an explosion -

and then the presence and voice of God.

Is it a terror or a comfort 

that He is both so close and so distant?

His voice right in my ear,

and also reaching further than I can imagine?