Load

Henry Hillier Parker

Load

Today we carried home the last brown sheaf

and hookt the scythe against the dry barn wall:

the yellow border's on the chestnut leaf,

the beech leaf's yellow all.

Tomorrow we must bring the apples in,

they are as big as they shall ever be:

already starlings ready to begin

have tasted many a tree.

And in the garden, all the roses done,

the light lies gently, faint and almost cold,

on wither'd goldenrod and snapdragon

and tarnisht marigold.

John Hewitt

It is too easy to forget what the seasons really mean. Food! For the mouth and heart and eyes. And the different work that this entails. There was a time when the earth was closer to my everyday experience. But I have lost contact in many ways. Is it strange to find it in words, in poetry? Now, when I am walking the paved streets, I remember how it used to be. My mother in the garden, pulling up bright orange carrots, purple beets, washing them clean. Shelling peas, blanching endive, slicing green beans – each vegetable in its time, and time a succession of vegetable events. I miss earth time. Clock time is my conductor now, and it’s not the same.

Thank goodness for poetry and memory.

“Today we carried home the last brown sheaf.”

“Tomorrow we must bring the apples in.”

Ballad of Another Ophelia

Emile Claus “Poultry in a Wood”

Ballad of Another Ophelia

Oh the green glimmer of apples in the orchard,

Lamps in a wash of rain!

Oh the wet walk of my brown hen through the stackyard,

Oh tears on the window pane!

Nothing now will ripen the bright green apples,

Full of disappointment and of rain,

Brackish they will taste, of tears, when the yellow dapples

Of autumn tell the withered tale again.

All round the yard it is cluck, my brown hen,

Cluck, and the rain-wet wings,

Cluck, my marigold bird, and again

Cluck for your yellow darlings.

For the grey rat found the gold thirteen

Huddled away in the dark,

Flutter for a moment, oh the beast is quick and keen,

Extinct one yellow-fluffy spark.

Once I had a lover bright like running water,

Once his face was laughing like the sky;

Open like the sky looking down in all its laughter

On the buttercups, and the buttercups was I.

What, then, is there hidden in the skirts of all the blossom?

What is peeping from your wings, oh mother hen?

’Tis the sun who asks the question, in a lovely haste for wisdom;

What a lovely haste for wisdom is in men!

Yea, but it is cruel when undressed is all the blossom,

And her shift is lying white upon the floor,

That a grey one, like a shadow, like a rat, a thief, a rain-storm,

Creeps upon her then and gathers in his store.

Oh the grey garner that is full of half-grown apples,

Oh the golden sparkles laid extinct!

And oh, behind the cloud-sheaves, like yellow autumn dapples,

Did you see the wicked sun that winked!

D.H. Lawrence

I've been wanting to add this poem for a while. But it's completely mad. Of course it is. Ophelia was mad. But who is this "other" Ophelia? It's a complete mystery to me. Why is it that I have no idea what is being said and still I like it? It's as if we can see through the eyes of a person who translates everything - apples, brown hen, rain, yellow bird, blossom, sun - into a strange paranoid sense of impending doom. I like that. It reminds me that my thoughts are often wildly inaccurate, coloured by emotion, and they close in on me. A poem like this reminds me that I can crawl out of the rabbit hole. 




  

To the Light of September

Annie Soudain

To the Light of September

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

W.S. Merwin


I like how the poem is addressed to the light as if it were a person. "For now it seems as though you are still summer...But they all know that you have come." And isn't it true? I was sitting in the sun this afternoon and for a moment it could've been August. But even though the leaves haven't turned, there's an unmistakable feeling in the air. It's no longer summer. You have arrived.