Poetry Friday: Fall, by Edward Hirsch

On Facebook yesterday, I posted this picture, a sampling from Atticus's garden, and I said: 

I'm not a gardener. But on a cool September morning, when I'm picking vegetables, feeling grateful for my husband's love of growing things...there's no place I'd rather be than in that garden.

The calendar may still call it summer, but the season is changing here. I'm reminded of Emily Dickinson (As imperceptibly as grief, the summer lapsed away) and Edward Hirsch knows it, too. 

Fall
by Edward Hirsch

Fall, falling, fallen. That's the way the season
Changes its tense in the long-haired maples
That dot the road; the veiny hand-shaped leaves
Redden on their branches (in a fiery competition
With the final remaining cardinals) and then
Begin to sidle and float through the air, at last
Settling into colorful layers carpeting the ground.
At twilight the light, too, is layered in the trees....

(Read the whole thing here, at The Writer's Almanac.)

~~~~~

Amy Ludwig VanDerwater has the round up today at The Poem Farm.