September Tomatoes

The whiskey stink of rot has settled
in the garden, and a burst of fruit flies rises
when I touch the dying tomato plants.

Still, the claws of tiny yellow blossoms
flail in the air as I pull the vines up by the roots
and toss them in the compost.

It feels cruel. Something in me isn’t ready
to let go of summer so easily. To destroy
what I’ve carefully cultivated all these months.
Those pale flowers might still have time to fruit.

My great-grandmother sang with the girls of her village
as they pulled the flax. Songs so old
and so tied to the season that the very sound
seemed to turn the weather.

--Karina Borowicz. Massachusetts-based American poet

For We Are Thy People

For we are thy people, and thou art our God;
We are thy children and thou our father.
We are thy servants, and thou art our master;
We are thy congregation and thou our portion.
We are thine inheritance, thou our lot;
We are thy flock, thou our shepherd.
We are thy vineyard, and thou art our keeper;
We are thy work, and thou our creator.
We are thy faithful one: thou art our beloved;
We are thy chosen: thou art the Lord our God.
We are thy subjects, thou our King;
We are thine acknowledged people, thou our acknowledged Lord.

--anonymous, from the Liturgy of Yom Kippur eve

Song for Autumn

Don’t you imagine the leaves dream now
   how comfortable it will be to touch
the earth instead of the
   nothingness of the air and the endless
freshets of wind? And don’t you think
   the trees, especially those with
mossy hollows, are beginning to look for

the fires that will come—six, a dozen—to sleep
   inside their bodies? And don’t you hear
the goldenrod whispering goodbye,
   the everlasting being crowned with the first
tuffets of snow? The pond
   stiffens and the white field over which
the fox runs so quickly brings out
   its long blue shadows. The wind wags
its many tails. And in the evening
   the piled firewood shifts a little,
longing to be on its way.

--Mary Oliver (1935-2019), American poet

What Are Years?

What is our innocence,
what is our guilt? All are 

naked, none is safe. And whence 

is courage: the unanswered question, 

the resolute doubt, — 

dumbly calling, deafly listening—that 

in misfortune, even death, 

encourages others 

and in its defeat, stirs 

the soul to be strong? He 

sees deep and is glad, who 

accedes to mortality 

and in his imprisonment rises 

upon himself as t

he sea in a chasm, struggling to be 

free and unable to be, 

in its surrendering 

finds its continuing. 

So he who strongly feels, 

behaves. The very bird, 

grown taller as he sings, steels 

his form straight up. Though he is captive, 

his mighty singing 

says, satisfaction is a lowly 

thing, how pure a thing is joy. 

This is mortality, 

this is eternity.


--Marianne Moore (1887-1972), American poet and editor

First Fall

I’m your guide here. In the evening-dark
morning streets, I point and name.
Look, the sycamores, their mottled,
paint-by-number bark. Look, the leaves
rusting and crisping at the edges.
I walk through Schiller Park with you
on my chest. Stars smolder well
into daylight. Look, the pond, the ducks,
the dogs paddling after their prized sticks.
Fall is when the only things you know
because I’ve named them
begin to end. Soon I’ll have another
season to offer you: frost soft
on the window and a porthole
sighed there, ice sleeving the bare
gray branches. The first time you see
something die, you won’t know it might
come back. I’m desperate for you
to love the world because I brought you here.

--Maggie Smith (1977- ), American poet and freelance writer

Sonnet LXXIII

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

--William Shakespeare (1564-1616), pivotal English playwright, poet, and actor

Read by Sir Patrick Stewart in his "A Sonnet A Day" COVID19 project:

Insomnia I

Some nights it's bound to be your best way out,

When nightmare is the short end of the stick,
When sleep is a part of town where it's not safe
To walk at night, when waking is the only way
You have of distancing your wretched dead,
A growing crowd, and escaping out of their
Time into yours for another little while;

Then pass ghostly, a planet in the house
Never observed, among the sleeping rooms
Where children dream themselves, and thence go down
Into the empty domain where daylight reigned;
Reward yourself with drink and a book to read,
A mystery, for its elusive gift
Of reassurance against the hour of death.
Order your heart about: Stop doing that!
And get the world to be secular again.

Then, when you know who done it, turn out the light,
And quietly in darkness, in moonlight, or snowlight
Reflective, listen to the whistling earth
In its backspin trajectory around the sun
That makes the planets sometimes retrograde
And brings the cold forgiveness of the dawn
Whose light extinguishes all stars but one.


-- Howard Nemerov (1920-1991), US poet laureate 1963-1964 and 1988-1990. American poet and teacher

The heat of autumn

The heat of autumn

is different from the heat of summer.
One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider.
One is a dock you walk out on,
the other the spine of a thin swimming horse
and the river each day a full measure colder.
A man with cancer leaves his wife for his lover.
Before he goes she straightens his belts in the closet,
rearranges the socks and sweaters inside the dresser
by color. That's autumn heat:
her hand placing silver buckles with silver,
gold buckles with gold, setting each
on the hook it belongs on in a closet soon to be empty,
and calling it pleasure.

--Jane Hirshfield (1953- ), American poet and translator

Fall, leaves, fall

Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;
Lengthen night and shorten day;
Every leaf speaks bliss to me
Fluttering from the autumn tree.
I shall smile when wreaths of snow
Blossom where the rose should grow;
I shall sing when night’s decay
Ushers in a drearier day.

--Emily Bronte (1818-1848), English novelist and poet

A Homecoming

One faith is bondage. Two
are free. In the trust
of old love, cultivation shows
a dark graceful wilderness
at its heart. Wild
in that wilderness, we roam
the distances of our faith,
safe beyond the bounds
of what we know. O love,
open. Show me
my country. Take me home.


--Wendell Berry (1934- ), American farmer, essayist, poet, agrarian, author, environmental activist

Day in Autumn

After the summer's yield, Lord, it is time
to let your shadow lengthen on the sundials
and in the pastures let the rough winds fly.

As for the final fruits, coax them to roundness.
Direct on them two days of warmer light
to hale them golden toward their term, and harry
the last few drops of sweetness through the wine.

Whoever's homeless now, will build no shelter;
who lives alone will live indefinitely so,
waking up to read a little, draft long letters,
and, along the city's avenues,
fitfully wander, when the wild leaves loosen.

--Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926, born René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke)  (translated by Mary Kinzie-- translator's notes may be found here at Poetry magazine), Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist.

Today is the first day of autumn, as of 9:46 this morning.

A Poem for S.

Because you used to leaf through the dictionary,
Casually, as someone might in a barber shop, and
Devotedly, as someone might in a sanctuary,
Each letter would still have your attention if not
For the responsibilities life has tightly fit, like
Gears around the cog of you, like so many petals
Hinged on a daisy. That’s why I’ll just use your
Initial. Do you know that in one treasured story, a
Jewish ancestor, horseback in the woods at Yom
Kippur, and stranded without a prayer book,
Looked into the darkness and realized he had
Merely to name the alphabet to ask forgiveness—
No congregation of figures needed, he could speak
One letter at a time because all of creation
Proceeded from those. He fed his horse, and then
Quietly, because it was from his heart, he
Recited them slowly, from aleph to tav. Within those
Sounds, all others were born, all manner of
Trials, actions, emotions, everything needed to
Understand who he was, had been, how flaws
Venerate the human being, how aspirations return
Without spite. Now for you, may your wife’s
X-ray return with good news, may we raise our
Zarfs to both your names in the Great Book of Life.

--Jessica Greenbaum (1957- ), Jewish American poet, writer, and teacher

The Birthday of the World

On the birthday of the world
I begin to contemplate
what I have done and left
undone, but this year
not so much rebuilding

of my perennially damaged
psyche, shoring up eroding
friendships, digging out
stumps of old resentments
that refuse to rot on their own.

No, this year I want to call
myself to task for what
I have done and not done
for peace. How much have
I dared in opposition?

How much have I put
on the line for freedom?
For mine and others?
As these freedoms are pared,
sliced and diced, where

have I spoken out? Who
have I tried to move? In
this holy season, I stand
self-convicted of sloth
in a time when lies choke

the mind and rhetoric
bends reason to slithering
choking pythons. Here
I stand before the gates
opening, the fire dazzling

my eyes, and as I approach
what judges me, I judge
myself. Give me weapons
of minute destruction. Let
my words turn into sparks.


--Marge Piercy (1936- ), Jewish American poet, author, and activist, from The Crooked Inheritance, 2006.

Posted for Rosh Hashanah, 5781.

When Great Trees Fall

When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.

When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.

Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance,
fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
of dark, cold
caves.

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.

-- Maya Angelou (1928-2014), African American poet, writer, activist, and memoirist.

Posted in Memory of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died last night on the eve of Rosh Hashanah.

O Virtus Sapientiae / O Moving Force of Wisdom

O moving force of Wisdom, encircling the wheel of the cosmos,
Encompassing all that is, all that has life,
in one vast circle.
You have three wings: The first unfurls aloft
in the highest heights.
The second dips its way dripping sweat on the Earth.
Over, under, and through all things whirls the third.
Praise to you, O Wisdom worthy of praise!

--Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179), German mystic, poet, musician, Abbess, monastic and philosopher, whose feast day is today.

Anger Against Beasts

The hook of adrenaline shoves
into the blood. Man's will,
long schooled to kill or have
its way, would drive the beast
against nature, transcend
the impossible in simple fury.
The blow falls like a dead seed.
It is defeat, for beasts
do not pardon, but heal or die
in the absence of the past.
The blow survives in the man.
His triumph is a wound. Spent,
he must wait the slow
unalterable forgiveness of time.


--Wendell Berry (1934- ), American farmer, essayist, poet, agrarian, author, environmental activist

The Wren From Carolina

Just now the wren from Carolina buzzed
through the neighbor’s hedge
a line of grace notes I couldn’t even write down
much less sing. 

Now he lifts his chestnut colored throat
and delivers such a cantering praise—
for what?
For the early morning, the taste of the spider, 

for his small cup of life
that he drinks from every day, knowing it will refill.
All things are inventions of holiness.
Some more rascally than others. 

I’m on that list too,
though I don’t know exactly where.

But, every morning, there’s my own cup of gladness,
and there’s that wren in the hedge, above me, with his

blazing song.

-- Mary Oliver (1935- ), whose birthday is today, from Why I Wake Early: New Poems

Oaks and Squirrels

Genesis18:27

“I speak to my Lord though I am dust and ashes,”
A Handful of Ashes the wind will soon send flying
Into the drifted oak-leaves under the hedge.
No gardener ever rakes there
Only the squirrels gather bedding there
When they stack up their rustling nests.

You have granted me more time
On earth than the squirrels, less time than the Oak,
Whose secret takes a hundred years to tell.
Out of the acorn in the dirt
Its wooden sticks come up
Already knowing how to grow their leaves
And when to spend them all,
Knowing exactly
How to thread up into a winter sky
A dark-veined map like that of a great river
Spun out in tapering streams,
Twig by twig ascending and unfolding
Until at night its topmost buds
Enter the country of the stars.

By day
The squirrels run like script along its boughs
And write their lives with their light bodies.
They are afraid of us
We can never hold them
And there's no room for us in their invisible ark,
our home is warring disobedient history.


--Anne Porter (1911-2011) American Roman Catholic poet, from Living Things: Collected Poems, 2006.

Prayer After Eating

I have taken in the light
that quickened eye and leaf.
May my brain be bright with praise
of what I eat, in the brief blaze
of motion and of thought.
May I be worthy of my meat.

--Wendell Berry (1934- ), American farmer, essayist, poet, agrarian, author, environmental activist

Image: detail of a window by Emil Frei and Sons at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church, Ferguson, MO

Environmental Awareness: The Right Whale

They think that if she waded in a stream or lake, the fish would die.


The whale was known as right because it was
magnificent with oil, slow and easy

to find and slaughter, floating even when dead.
But after it was no longer needed for fat,

men still haunted the whale for its rich mouth
of baleen, harvested for hairbrushes,

buggy whips, umbrella ribs, the stays
of corsets-- vain things designed to mold the female

body, sculpt a waste so small a man’s
hands could meet with ease around it. Crazy,

the girls agree, the way those women bought it.


--Claudia Emerson (1957-2014), Pulitzer prize- winning poet, songwriter, poet laureate of Virginia in 2008.

Lullaby in Fracktown

Child, when you’re sad put on your blue shoes.
You know that Mama loves you lollipops
and Daddy still has a job to lose.

So put on a party hat. We’ll play the kazoos
loud and louder from the mountaintop.
Child, when you’re sad put on your blue shoes

and dance the polka with pink kangaroos,
dolphin choirs singing “flip-flop, flip-flop.”
Hey, Daddy still has a job to lose — 

don’t be afraid. Close your eyes, snooze,
because today our suns have flared and dropped.
Tomorrow when you wake, put on your blue shoes.

Eat a good breakfast. Be good in school.
Good boys go to college goody gumdrops
so someday too you’ll have a job to lose.

Waste trucks clatter by as the gray bird coos.
Flames pour forth when the faucet’s unstopped.
Child, when you’re sad put on your blue shoes.
For now, Daddy still has a job to lose.

--Lilace Mellin Guignard, American poet, teacher, essayist, and outdoorswoman

Photo from NPR- The state capitol of Oklahoma.

St. Brendan's Prayer: On Setting Out

Shall I abandon, 

O King of mysteries, 

the soft comforts of home? 

Shall I turn my back on my native land, 

and turn my face towards the sea?

Shall I put myself wholly at your mercy, 

without silver, 

without a horse, 

without fame, 

without honour? 

Shall I throw myself wholly upon You, 

without sword and shield, 

without food and drink, 

without a bed to lie on? 

Shall I say farewell to my beautiful land, 

placing myself under Your yoke?

Shall I pour out my heart to You, 

confessing my manifold sins and begging forgiveness, 

tears streaming down my cheeks? 

Shall I leave the prints of my knees 

on the sandy beach, 

a record of my final prayer in my native land?

Shall I then suffer every kind of wound 

that the sea can inflict? 

Shall I take my tiny boat 

across the wide sparkling ocean? 

O King of the Glorious Heaven, 

shall I go of my own choice upon the sea?

O Christ, will You help me on the wild waves?

--St. Brendan of Clonfert (the Navigator) (484-577 CE), Irish patron saint of Kerry and Clonfert, founder of a monastery in the Aran Islands, monastic and sailor, one of the "Twelve Apostles of Ireland" who is renowned for his sea journey with 16 other monks to find the Isle of the Blessed, aka the Garden of Eden