OCTOBER

Onward from summer’s bliss / Time to buckle down / Time to pursue / Time to work for next year’s freedom

Cornucopia to come / What we have lost; light and sun and hours on the beach / We now harvest / An abundance of all forgot we love

Tea and toddys / Return to our homes / The makings have been there all along / What else have we been missing?

Open to the winds / To the shedding of what is no longer alive in us / Like the leaves of trees / Variations of reds, oranges, and browns / Simply indicate that they have given up

Boats return to their harbors / For safety, for shelter, for the following several months / It is now that wildlife thrives

Everything in stride / Roll with the current / Put a pumpkin on your doorstep / Keep an umbrella in your bag

Rain is coming / Night will swallow our days / We can’t say we didn’t know it was coming / October happens every year

 

—

also, one of my favorite songs in the world, by one of my favorite bands in the world, live on one of my favorite radio stations in the world:

In Those Years

In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life
and, yes, that was the only life
we could bear witness to

But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through rages of fog
where we stood, saying I

“In Those Years” by Adrienne Rich

photo by Sebastian Wikström