End with an image and don’t explain!
Stanley Kunitz
The End of Summer
By Stanley Jasspon 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.
This past Sunday was one of those September days that was masquerading as July. It was hot, muggy, sunny and absolutely perfect, unless you found yourself on the top rungs of a ladder applying stain to siding on the southern and western sides of the house. Then, it was down right HOT! I embodied the last line of Hopkins poem below, I was my sweaty self, but worse.
The end of summer is here and fall is clearly visible in the canopy with trees starting to turn and leaves starting to drop. Mentally if I go through the check list of all the projects I aspired to complete this summer, I would give myself a B+. The problem with house projects is the idea of getting something repaired is never as easy as the reality of actually fixing it. It’s even more difficult when there are differing opinions on what actually needs to be done or how “easy” it would be to do it. Ha! But alas, I will not throw myself into damnation for my failures, like Hopkins seems want to do. Instead I’ll give myself a pass and realize all those projects will be like a good hound, waiting for me faithfully next year.
Sonnet 45 – The Terrible Sonnets
by Gerard Manley Hopkins
I WAKE and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sighs you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.
I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyest of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.
Fourteen Lines 