The farther we’ve gotten from the magic and mystery of our past, the more we’ve come to need Halloween
Paula Curan: October Dreams, A Celebration of Halloween
Theme in Yellow
by Carl Sandburg (1878 – 1967)
I spot the hills With yellow balls in autumn. I light the prairie cornfields Orange and tawny gold clusters And I am called pumpkins. On the last of October When dusk is fallen Children join hands And circle round me Singing ghost songs And love to the harvest moon; I am a jack-o’-lantern With terrible teeth And the children know I am fooling.
Mr. Macklin’s Jack O’Lantern
by David McCord (1897 – 1997)
Mr. Macklin takes his knife And carves the yellow pumpkin face: Three holes bring eyes and nose to life, The mouth has thirteen teeth in place. Then Mr. Macklin just for fun Transfers the corn-cob pipe from his Wry mouth to Jack’s, and everyone Dies laughing! O what fun it is Till Mr. Macklin draws the shade And lights the candle in Jack’s skull. Then all the inside dark is made As spooky and as horrorful As Halloween, and creepy crawl The shadows on the tool-house floor, With Jack’s face dancing on the wall. O Mr. Macklin! where’s the door?
The thing about great poetry is we have no defenses against it.
David Whyte
“Stone” (Thobar Phádraig)
by David Whyte
The face in the stone is a mirror looking into you. You have gazed into the moving waters, you have seen the slow light, in the sky above Lough Inagh, beneath you, streams have flowed, and rivers of earth have moved beneath your feet, but you have never looked into the immovability of stone like this, the way it holds you, gives you not a way forward but a doorway in, staunches your need to leave, becomes faithful by going nowhere, something that wants you to stay here and look back, be weathered by what comes to you, like the way you too have travelled from so far away to be here, once reluctant and now as solid and as here and as willing to be touched as everything you have found.
The Old Wild Place
by David Whyte
After the good earth where the body knows itself to be real and the mad flight where it gives itself to the world, we give ourselves to the rhythm of love leaving the breath to know its way home.
And after the first pure fall, the last letting go, and the calm breath where we go to rest, we’ll return again to find it and feel the body welcomed, the body held, the strong arms of the world, the water, the waking at dawn and the thankful, almost forgotten, curling to sleep with the dark.
Age is an issue of mind over matter, if you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.
Mark Twain
A Birthday
By Christina Rossetti
My heart is like a singing bird Whose nest is in a water’d shoot; My heart is like an apple-tree Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit; My heart is like a rainbow shell That paddles in a halcyon sea; My heart is gladder than all these Because my love is come to me.
Raise me a dais of silk and down; Hang it with vair and purple dyes; Carve it in doves and pomegranates, And peacocks with a hundred eyes; Work it in gold and silver grapes, In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys; Because the birthday of my life Is come, my love is come to me.
My Mother would have turned 89 this week. Despite having lived to an age beyond what her parents and sisters experienced, it feels like she died young at 83 for a person who was as vibrant as her right up until the end. Her death combined with COVID has changed my fall and winter routines. Normally October is the beginning of theater season, with both her or I having secured tickets to ballets, and plays and concerts to look forward to throughout the fall and winter season and to help carry us through the coldest months to spring. It seems like a foreign concept right now, the idea of attending live events. The Rolling Stones tour came to Minneapolis last night and by all accounts put on a good show. Its funny to think that Mick Jagger is closer in age to my Mother than to me. But my Mother was a rock star in her own right.
I am not sure if I am getting better with dealing with loss with age but I seem more resigned to it these days. A new puppy arrived at our farm over the weekend. A 7 1/2 week old golden retriever puppy that if all goes as planned will become a breeding female for a service dog program in the future. I haven’t had a puppy in my life for 20 years, so it is feeling like we have a new born infant in the house again. It is also a reminder on how fast our lives move by. This puppy will carry me into my 70’s. For now it is a confident ball of fluff that has the entire household on its tip toes, her 12 year old golden retriever brother genuinely enjoying showing the puppy the ropes, but also a little jealous at all the attention going the puppies direction. Tasha the cat is a bit grumpy but will come around. I have never seen a puppy this confident, a puppy so quick to adapt to its new environment. Her name is Vida – life! And she is just what our household needed this fall.
What I Learned From My Mother
By Julia Kasdorf
I learned from my mother how to love the living, to have plenty of vases on hand in case you have to rush to the hospital with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole grieving household, to cube home-canned pears and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point. I learned to attend viewings even if I didn’t know the deceased, to press the moist hands of the living, to look in their eyes and offer sympathy, as though I understood loss even then. I learned that whatever we say means nothing, what anyone will remember is that we came. I learned to believe I had the power to ease awful pains materially like an angel. Like a doctor, I learned to create from another’s suffering my own usefulness, and once you know how to do this, you can never refuse. To every house you enter, you must offer healing: a chocolate cake you baked yourself, the blessing of your voice, your chaste touch.
“To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.”
Robert Louis Stevenson
October
by William Cullen Bryant (1794 – 1878)
Ay, thou art welcome, heaven’s delicious breath! When woods begin to wear the crimson leaf, And suns grow meek, and the meek suns grow brief And the year smiles as it draws near its death. Wind of the sunny south! oh, still delay In the gay woods and in the golden air, Like to a good old age released from care, Journeying, in long serenity, away. In such a bright, late quiet, would that I Might wear out life like thee, ‘mid bowers and brooks
And dearer yet, the sunshine of kind looks, And music of kind voices ever nigh; And when my last sand twinkled in the glass, Pass silently from men, as thou dost pass
Autumn Fires
by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 – 1894)
In the other gardens And all up in the vale, From the autumn bonfires See the smoke trail!
Pleasant summer over, And all the summer flowers, The red fire blazes, The grey smoke towers.
Sing a song of seasons! Something bright in all! Flowers in the summer, Fires in the fall!
Absurdity, only you are pure. Absurdity, only before you is this excess sweated out of golden pleasure.
César Vallego
Paris, October 1936
by César Vallejo
From all of this I am the only one who leaves. From this bench I go away, from my pants, from my great situation, from my actions, from my number split side to side, from all of this I am the only one who leaves.
From the Champs Elysées or as the strange alley of the Moon makes a turn, my death goes away, my cradle leaves, and, surrounded by people, alone, cut loose,
my human resemblance turns around and dispatches its shadows one by one.
And I move away from everything, since everything remains to create my alibi: my shoe, its eyelet, as well as its mud and even the bend in the elbow of my own buttoned shirt.
Cesar Vallejo was quoted as saying; “I was born on a day God was sick.” A Peruvian poet, novelist, journalist and activist, who struggled throughout his lifetime. Accused of a crime he didn’t commit in his native homeland, an accusation that was politically motivated because of his socialist politics and writings, he fled to Europe and spent most of his adult life in Spain and France. Vallejo’s legal troubles in Peru haunted him in his attempts to achieve legal citizenship in both Spain and France and his increasingly communist leanings in his writing made that even more complicated. Vallejo toiled in dire poverty throughout the 1920s and early 1930’s, but managed to make multiple trips to the Soviet Union which he documented in several books published in the early 1930s. A regular cultural contributor to weeklies in Peru, Vallejo also sent articles to newspapers and magazines in other parts of Latin America, Spain, Italy, and France, but his writing provided a scant income. In 1930 the Spanish government awarded him a modest author’s grant which helped ease his financial situation. Vallejo returned to Paris in 1934 and married Georgette Philippart, who became a controversial figure after his death by controlling and limiting the publication of Vallejo’s lifelong work.
Vallejo was plagued by ill health throughout his life time. In 1938 he became bed ridden by what turned out to be a return of a latent form of Malaria which he had gotten in childhood. He became extremely ill and died in Paris 1938 at age 46. Vallejo’s poetry gained recognition after his death as one of the first modernist poet’s in Latin America. Death was a common theme in his poetry. I wonder if it rained on the day of his death as he predicted?
Black Stone Lying On A White Stone
by César Vallejo
I will die in Paris, on a rainy day, on some day I can already remember. I will die in Paris—and I don’t step aside— perhaps on a Thursday, as today is Thursday, in autumn.
It will be a Thursday, because today, Thursday, setting down these lines, I have put my upper arm bones on wrong, and never so much as today have I found myself with all the road ahead of me, alone.
César Vallejo is dead. Everyone beat him although he never does anything to them; they beat him hard with a stick and hard also
with a rope. These are the witnesses: the Thursdays, and the bones of my arms, the solitude, and the rain, and the roads. .
“Come, little leaves,” said the wind one day. “Come o’er the meadows with me, and play’ Put on your dress of red and gold,— Summer is gone, and the days grow cold.”
Soon as the leaves heard the wind’s loud call, Down they came fluttering, one and all; Over the brown fields they danced and flew, Singing the soft little songs they knew.
“Cricket, good-by, we’ve been friends so long; Little brook, sing us your farewell song,— Say you are sorry to see us go; Ah! you will miss us, right well we know.”
“Dear little lambs, in your fleecy fold, Mother will keep you from harm and cold; Fondly we’ve watched you in vale and glade; Say, will you dream of our loving shade?”
Dancing and whirling, the little leaves went; Winter had called them, and they were content. Soon fast asleep in their earthy beds, The snow laid a coverlet over their heads.
We have had a very summer like fall so far, but that’s about to change. A little nip in the air makes me feel playful and I am looking forward to temperatures dropping. I find the process of raking leaves relaxing. No leaf blowers allowed at my house, I like the quiet rustle of leaves and honestly find a big rake with a tarp faster and more efficient for cleaning up. Gone are the days when I would look forward to jumping into the leaf pile in the compost bin once the chore of raking was complete, but I remember fondly jumping off the ladder into the mammoth leaf pile that the oak trees in our yard as a kid would create.
Today’s poems are both from the 19th century, and written for as children’s poems. Cooper was known more for his song lyrics, but also published a wide range of poetry in his lifetime. Many of his song lyrics were set to music by Stephen Foster, one of the most influential song writers of his generation. Here’s an example of one of their less serious collaborations.
How the Leaves Came Down
by Susan Coolidge (1835 – 1905)
I’ll tell you how the leaves came down. The great Tree to his children said, “You’re getting sleepy, Yellow and Brown, Yes, very sleepy, little Red; It is quite time you went to bed.”
“Ah!” begged each silly, pouting leaf, “Let us a little longer May; Dear Father Tree, behold our grief, ‘Tis such a very pleasant day We do not want to go away.”
So, just for one more merry day To the great Tree the leaflets clung, Frolicked and danced and had their way, Upon the autumn breezes swung, Whispering all their sports among,
“Perhaps the great Tree will forget And let us stay until the spring If we all beg and coax and fret.” But the great Tree did no such thing; He smiled to hear their whispering.
“Come, children all, to bed,” he cried; And ere the leaves could urge their prayer He shook his head, and far and wide, Fluttering and rustling everywhere, Down sped the leaflets through the air.
I saw them; on the ground they lay, Golden and red, a huddled swarm, Waiting till one from far away, White bed-clothes heaped upon her arm, Should come to wrap them safe and warm.
The great bare Tree looked down and smiled. “Good-night, dear little leaves” he said; And from below each sleepy child Replied “Good-night,” and murmured, “It is so nice to go to bed.”
I am so glad you are here. It helps me realize how beautiful my world is.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Weißt du noch: (ohne Titel)
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Weißt du noch: fallende Sterne, die quer wie Pferde durch die Himmel sprangen über plötzlich hingehaltne Stangen unsrer Wünsche– hatten wir so viele?– denn es sprangen Sterne, ungezählt; fast ein jeder Aufblick war vermählt mit dem raschen Wagnis ihrer Spiele, und das Herz fühlte empfand sich als ein Ganzes unter diesen Trümmern ihres Glanzes and war heil, als überstünd es sie!
Untitled [Do you still remember: falling stars]
by Rainer Maria Rilke – 1875-1926 Translated by Albert Earnest Flemming
Do you still remember: falling stars, how they leapt slantwise through the sky like horses over suddenly held-out hurdles of our wishes—did we have so many?— for stars, innumerable, leapt everywhere; almost every gaze upward became wedded to the swift hazard of their play, and our heart felt like a single thing beneath that vast disintegration of their brilliance— and was whole, as if it would survive them
Herbsttag
by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)
Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr groß. Leg deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenuhren, und auf den Fluren laß die Winde los.
Befiel den letzten Früchten voll zu sein; gib ihnen noch zwei südlichere Tage, dränge sie zur Vollendung hin und jage die letzte Süße in den schweren Wein.
Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr. Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben, wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben und wird in den Alleen hin und her unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben.
Autumn Day
By Rainer Maria Rilke Translated by Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebman
Lord: it is time. . . The summer was immense.
Lay your shadow on the sundials and let loose the wind in the fields.
Bid the last fruits to be full; give them another two more southerly days, press them to ripeness, and chase the last sweetness into the heavy wine.
Whoever has no house now will not build one anymore.
Whoever is alone now will remain so for a long time, will stay up, read, write long letters, and wander the avenues, up and down, restlessly, while the leaves are blowing.
I am as I am and so will I be But how that I am none knoweth truly, Be it evil be it well, be I bond be I free I am as I am and so will I be.
Sir Thomas Wyatt
My Galley, Charged With Forgetfulness
by Sir Thomas Wyatt
My galley, charged with forgetfulness, Thorough sharp seas in winter nights doth pass ‘Tween rock and rock; and eke mine enemy, alas, That is my lord, steereth with cruelness; And every oar a thought in readiness, As though that death were light in such a case. An endless wind doth tear the sail apace Of forced sighs and trusty fearfulness. A rain of tears, a cloud of dark disdain, Hath done the weared cords great hinderance; Wreathed with error and eke with ignorance. The stars be hid that led me to this pain. Drowned is reason that should me consort, And I remain despairing of the port
Thomas Wyatt life reads like the next installment of Bridgerton, except with mostly unhappy endings. His life is so steeped in myth, rumors and innuendo in what has been passed down that generations of academics have yet to completely unravel fact from fiction. What is chronicled makes for juicy reading. Wyatt was a large athletic man, who was as comfortable in the jousting ring as in matters of court and the arts. A successful diplomat and patron of Thomas Cromwell, Wyatt ran in and out of favor with King Henry the VIII, as he pried the Catholic Church’s stranglehold from all matters of court and bloody birthed the Church of England into being. Cromwell was not so fortunate and was executed for his largely honorable service to his country. Despite rumors of romantic connections to Anne Boleyne, or because of it, Wyatt escaped multiple imprisonments and charges of treason with not only his life, but eventually his reputation and standing in court restored. But luck never seemed to run on Wyatt’s side for very long and in 1941 while on a diplomatic mission with Spain he was struck down by a fever.
Wyatt is credited with introducing the sonnet structure to English verse on whose literary accomplishments Shakespeare would use as a foundation. Wyatt’s poetry was widely circulated during his lifetime and included in anthologies following his death. Writing in a style that was personal, at times bitter and venomous, he was also deeply sentimental and romantic. Wyatt wrote of love from a complex perspective having seen and experienced its many facets. Wyatt’s poetry can run on the dark side, as betrayal was a common muse, knowing it could still a man’s heart every bit as the executioner’s ax in King Henry’s VIII court. While in prison in 1936, he wrote following Cromwell’s execution:
Sighs are my food, drink are my tears; Clinking of fetters such music would crave. Stink and close air away my life wears. Innocency is all the hope I have.
Wyatt’s contribution to the sonnet was unique in history. Wyatt’s sonnets are Petrarchian in their construction but with his own new English twist, he laid the path for Shakespeare to follow.
The Apparition
by John Donne
WHEN by thy scorn, O murd’ress, I am dead, And that thou thinkst thee free From all solicitation from me, Then shall my ghost come to thy bed, And thee, feign’d vestal, in worse arms shall see : Then thy sick taper will begin to wink, And he, whose thou art then, being tired before, Will, if thou stir, or pinch to wake him, think Thou call’st for more, And, in false sleep, will from thee shrink : And then, poor aspen wretch, neglected thou Bathed in a cold quicksilver sweat wilt lie, A verier ghost than I. What I will say, I will not tell thee now, Lest that preserve thee ; and since my love is spent, I’d rather thou shouldst painfully repent, Than by my threatenings rest still innocent.
“Nations, like plants and human beings, grow. And if the development is thwarted they are dwarfed and overshadowed.”
Claude McKay
All Yesterday It Poured
by Claude McKay
All yesterday it poured, and all night long I could not sleep; the rain unceasing beat Upon the shingled roof like a weird song, Upon the grass like running children’s feet. And down the mountains by the dark cloud kissed, Like a strange shape in filmy veiling dressed, Slid slowly, silently, the wraith-like mist, And nestled soft against the earth’s wet breast. But lo, there was a miracle at dawn! The still air stirred at touch of the faint breeze, The sun a sheet of gold bequeathed the lawn, The songsters twittered in the rustling trees. And all things were transfigured in the day, But me whom radiant beauty could not move; For you, more wonderful, were far away, And I was blind with hunger for your love.
Used
by Rita Dove
The conspiracy’s to make us thin. Size threes are all the rage, and skirts ballooning above twinkling knees are every man-chld’s preadolescent dream. Tabla rasa. No slate’s that clean–
we’ve earned the navels sunk in grief when the last child emptied us of their brief interior light. Our muscles say We have been used.
Have you ever tried silk sheets? I did, persuaded by postnatal dread and a Macy’s clerk to bargain for more zip. We couldn’t hang on, slipped to the floor and by morning the quilts had slid off, too. Enough of guilt– It’s hard work staying cool.
Fourteen Lines 