Fall poetry – Fourteen Lines

And Life Be As Sweet

I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it to myself, than to be crowded on a velvet cushion.
Henry David Thoreau

The Pumpkin

by John Greenleaf Whittier

Oh, fruit loved of boyhood! the old days recalling,

When wood-grapes were purpling and brown nuts were falling!

When wild, ugly faces we carved in its skin,

Glaring out through the dark with a candle within!

When we laughed round the corn-heap, with hearts all in tune,

Our chair a broad pumpkin,—our lantern the moon,

Telling tales of the fairy who travelled like steam,

In a pumpkin-shell coach, with two rats for her team!

Then thanks for thy present! none sweeter or better

E’er smoked from an oven or circled a platter!

Fairer hands never wrought at a pastry more fine,

Brighter eyes never watched o’er its baking, than thine!

And the prayer, which my mouth is too full to express,

Swells my heart that thy shadow may never be less,

That the days of thy lot may be lengthened below,

And the fame of thy worth like a pumpkin-vine grow,

And thy life be as sweet, and its last sunset sky

Golden-tinted and fair as thy own Pumpkin pie!

Haunted Houses (An Excerpt)

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 – 1882)

Our little lives are kept in equipoise
By opposite attractions and desires;
The struggle of the instinct that enjoys,
And the more noble instinct that aspires.

These perturbations, this perpetual jar
Of earthly wants and aspirations high,
Come from the influence of an unseen star
An undiscovered planet in our sky.

And as the moon from some dark gate of cloud
Throws o’er the sea a floating bridge of light,
Across whose trembling planks our fancies crowd
Into the realm of mystery and night,—

So from the world of spirits there descends
A bridge of light, connecting it with this,
O’er whose unsteady floor, that sways and bends,
Wander our thoughts above the dark abyss.

I Know The World

My writing is a picture of the mind moving.
Philip Whalen

Vermont

by Phillip Widden

A white wood house defines the slope. The trees
Have gone to red and flame. A field beyond
Is spread with grass and granite rocks at ease.
This stonewall pattern thinks it holds a pond.
But it is free beneath October’s sun,
At least as free as anything can be
In fever such as we all know when, done
With heavy summer, eyes begin to see
The chill of air and glaze themselves with dreams.
Restrained. The farmhouse windows have their fire
Inside as well. Twilight is more it seems,
And maple facts can mesmerize desire.
A white wood house defines the slope of hill
Where people keep another autumn, still.

A Vision of the Bodhisattvas

By Philip Whalen

They pass before me one by one riding on animals

“What are you waiting for,” they want to know

Z—, young as he is (& mad into the bargain) tells me

“Some day you’ll drop everything & become a rishi, you know.”

I know

The forest is there, I’ve lived in it

More certainly than this town? Irrelevant—

What am I waiting for?

A change in customs that will take 1000 years to come about?

Who’s to make the change but me?

“Returning again and again,” Amida says

Why’s that dream so necessary? walking out of whatever house alone

Nothing but the clothes on my back, money or no

Down the road to the next place the highway leading to the

mountains

From which I absolutely must come back

What business have I to do that?

I know the world and I love it too much and it

Is not the one I’d find outside this door.

Feel Me To Do Right

The summer that I was ten – Can it be there was only one summer that I was ten? It must have been a long one then.
May Swenson

That The Soul May Wax Plump

by May Swenson

“He who has reached the highest degree of
emptiness will be secure in repose.”
—A Taoist saying

My dumpy little mother on the undertaker’s slab
had a mannequin’s grace. From chin to foot
the sheet outlined her, thin and tall. Her face
uptilted, bloodless, smooth, had a long smile.
Her head rested on a block under her nape,
her neck was long, her hair waved, upswept. But later,
at “the viewing,” sunk in the casket in pink tulle,
an expensive present that might spoil, dressed
in Eden’s green apron, organdy bonnet on,
she shrank, grew short again, and yellow. Who
put the gold-rimmed glasses on her shut face, who
laid her left hand with the wedding ring on
her stomach that really didn’t seem to be there
under the fake lace?

Mother’s work before she died was self-purification,
a regimen of near starvation, to be worthy to go
to Our Father, Whom she confused (or, more aptly, fused)
with our father, in Heaven long since. She believed
in evacuation, an often and fierce purgation,
meant to teach the body to be hollow, that the soul
may wax plump. At the moment of her death, the wind
rushed out from all her pipes at once. Throat and rectum
sang together, a galvanic spasm, hiss of ecstasy.
Then, a flat collapse. Legs and arms flung wide,
like that female Spanish saint slung by the ankles
to a cross, her mouth stayed open in a dark O. So,
her vigorous soul whizzed free. On the undertaker’s slab,
she lay youthful, cool, triumphant, with a long smile.

Feel Me

By May Swenson

“Feel me to do right,” our father said on his deathbed.

We did not quite know—in fact, not at all—what he meant.

His last whisper was spent as through a slot in a wall.

He left us a key, but how did it fit? “Feel me

to do right.” Did it mean that, though he died, he would be felt

through some aperture, or by some unseen instrument

our dad just then had come to know? So, to do right always,

we need but feel his spirit? Or was it merely his apology

for dying? “Feel that I do right in not trying,

as you insist, to stay on your side. There is the wide

gateway and the splendid tower, and you implore me

to wait here, with the worms!”

Had he defined his terms, and could we discriminate

among his motives, we might have found out how to “do right”

before we died—supposing he felt he suddenly knew

what dying was. “You do wrong because you do not feel

as I do now” was maybe the sense. “Feel me, and emulate

my state, for I am becoming less dense—I am feeling right

for the first time.” And then the vessel burst,

and we were kneeling around an emptiness.

We cannot feel our father now. His power courses through us,

yes, but he—the chest and cheek, the foot and palm,

the mouth of oracle—is calm. And we still seek

his meaning. “Feel me,” he said, and emphasized that word.

Should we have heard it as a plea for a caress—

a constant caress, since flesh to flesh was all that we

could do right if we would bless him?

The dying must feel the pressure of that question—

lying flat, turning cold from brow to heel—the hot

cowards there above protesting their love, and saying,

“What can we do? Are you all right?” While the wall opens

and the blue night pours through. “What can we do?

We want to do what’s right.”

“Lie down with me, and hold me, tight. Touch me. Be

with me. Feel with me. Feel me to do right.”

The Secret Cold Clear Water

Love is the conversation between possible, searing disappointment and a profoundly imagined sense of arrival and fulfillment; how we shape that conversation is the touchstone of our ability to love in the real inhabited world.
David Whyte

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

by John Donne

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
The breath goes now, and some say, No:

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
‘Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did, and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers’ love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.

The Well of Grief

by David Whyte

Those who will not slip beneath
the still surface on the well of grief,
turning down through its black water
to the place we cannot breathe,
will never know the source from which we drink,
the secret water, cold and clear,
nor find in the darkness glimmering,
the small round coins,
thrown by those who wished for something else.

Tribute in Turbulence

Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.
Robert Fitzgerald

Metaphysician

by Robert Fitzgerald (1910 – 1985)

His logic unperturbed, exacting new
Tribute in turbulence, a tithe of motion:

Runners by whose feet daylight is shaken,
Moths, mantles wind-wrought, releases sharply
Against throned columns, shafts closing in air –

Attend. Time’s clear device in each man’s eye
Makes shadows what he sees, and streets shadows
Wherein we move, impelled or quieted.

We have been out to see the latest signs
Unbent from heaven, and these who staring walk
Beside us are not blind, and all who see
Through this low draft of shade will be undone.

Thus to lie one night with his back broken
And dream at dawn the idol in the stone.

Lightness in Autumn

By Robert Fitzgerald

The rake is like a wand or fan,

With bamboo springing in a span

To catch the leaves that I amass

In bushels on the evening grass.

I reckon how the wind behaves

And rake them lightly into waves

And rake the waves upon a pile,

Then stop my raking for a while.

The sun is down, the air is blue,

And soon the fingers will be, too,

But there are children to appease

With ducking in those leafy seas.

So loudly rummaging their bed

On the dry billows of the dead,

They are not warned at four and three

Of natural mortality.

Before their supper they require

A dragon field of yellow fire

To light and toast them in the gloom.

So much for old earth’s ashen doom.

Love Will Endure

We have to dare to be ourselves, no matter how frightening or strange that self may prove to be.
May Sarton

Poem in Autumn

by May Sarton

Now over everything the autumn light is thrown
And every line is sharp ad every leaf is clear,
Now without density or weight the airy sun
Sits in the flaming boughs, an innocent fire
That shines but does not burn nor wither.
The leaves, light-penetrated, change their essence,
Take on the gold transparence of the weather,
Are touched by death, then by light’s holy presence.

So we, first touched by death, were changed in essence,
As if grief grew transparent and turned to airy gold
And we were given days of special radiance,
Light-brimmed, light-shaken, and with love so filled
It seemed the heartbeat of the world was in our blood,
And when we stood together, love was everywhere,
And no exchange was needed, if exchange we could
The blessedness of sunlight poised on air.

Autumn Sonnets

by May Sarton

If I can let you go as trees let go
Their leaves, so casually, one by one;
If I can come to know what they do know,
That fall is the release, the consummation,
Then fear of time and the uncertain fruit
Would not distemper the great lucid skies
This strangest autumn, mellow and acute.
If I can take the dark with open eyes
And call it seasonal, not harsh or strange
(For love itself may need a time of sleep),
And, treelike, stand unmoved before the change,
Lose what I lose to keep what I can keep,
The strong root still alive under the snow,
Love will endure – if I can let you go

The Children Know

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?

Sing A Song of Seasons

“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!

Do You Still Remember

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.

When Was I Less By Dying?

I Died As A Mineral

by Rumi

I died as a mineral and became a plant,
I died as plant and became animal,
I died as animal and I was human.
Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?
Yet once more I shall die, to soar
With angels blest; but even from angelhood
I must pass on: all except God perishes.
Only when I have given up my angel-soul,
Shall I become what no mind has ever conceived.
Oh, let me not exist! for Non-existence
Proclaims in organ tones, To God we shall return.

If you google this quote from Rumi you will find many different English translations but rarely the entire passage from which it comes. This has been a favorite of mine from Rumi for many years. I discovered it during a focused time of spiritual re-awakening that coincided with a period of some of my most productive creative writing.

I wrote Noble Light in the fall of 2014 and it was one of two poems that unknowingly at the time, formed my jumping off point into what has become my obsession with sonnets. You could say Noble Light was my gate way drug. Obviously it is not a sonnet, but this poem was one of the most difficult I have ever written. I had dozens of drafts that I worked on for over a month that eventually I came to the realize, was actually two poems, not one. Once I dissected the lines and phrases and ideas into their respective corners, each poem on its own came together rather quickly. The other poem, also a poem of forgiveness, vaguely resembles a sonnet and Noble Light typical of my free verse, has just a tinge of rhyme to help the flow.

Back in those days, I would often share a finished draft of a new poem with my Mother via email as part of our daily correspondence. She often had interesting insights or suggestions for edits that made my writing better. It was fun to share with her the thrill of creativity and our mutual love of poetry. At that time I was writing so prodigiously I rarely went back to reread what I had written earlier, I filed poems away in the cloud of my little google Chromebook and moved on to the next poem and the next and the next. And so it surprised me a year later on one of our poetry nights, where each of us brought 4 to 5 poems to read, always from other poets not our original work, that she surprised me by selecting Noble Light to read back to me as one of her current favorites. I was honored and after she read it she shared her perspective of why this poem resonated with her. During that conversation, I made the mental connection between what was at the heart of my poem and some of the ideas in Rumi’s poem above, connections that were not obvious to me at the time I wrote it but were suddenly clear.

The next spring my Mother suffered a severe heart attack and wound up in two weeks of rehab following 10 days in the ICU and hospital. It was a long slow recovery. I visited her as often as possible and usually brought poetry. It became a regular ritual for her to ask at some point during our conversation and visit, “please read Nobel Light.” I am not sure how she in that moment connected to the whole of the poem, but the line; But next spring, buds shall swell with longing to be green again, resonated with what she was clinging to in that moment of recovery – hope, a hope that could carry her to wellness and be green again. It was humbling to have a line of my poetry mean that much to my Mother and I was pleased that she never tired of hearing me read it to her. I don’t revisit this poem very often since her death, but every fall, when I am on a walk and encounter popular leaves rattling their sacred song high in the canopy of the forest’s arched cathedral, I think of her and this poem. Happy Birthday Mom.

Noble Light

by T. A. Fry

In October, when infinite shades
of red, orange, green and yellow burn
bright against a brilliant sky;
Bathing everything in noble light
Do you pause in wonder?

Do you close your eyes
And listen to leathery poplar leaves
high in the canopy
rattle a sacred song?

In that moment
if you are drawn to forgiveness,
what do you put asunder?

When the wounded deer
bounded across our path
as we walked in the forest’s
arched cathedral; I could not
hear absolution in the crow’s
caw to the wolves.

But next spring, buds shall swell
With longing to be green again.
The winter’s snow will melt and sanctify
All remains obscured in these woods.

And the warmth of spring renewal
Will release countless bleached bones
From their sepulcher of snow.
To emerge cleansed to bask
Swaddled in hallowed leaves.