My focus this year has been writing daily haiku as a kind of journal to give to my distant daughter, but every once in a while a poem came from one inspiration or another.

Blessings of the season to all.


SEPTEMBER

you who are neither
before nor after
W.S. Merwin, "To The Light Of September"

A few leaves falling on the still water and
Now the first geese are lifting and leaving,
Leaving behind the contention and clarity
Of the two ponds where each flock defended
Their place and peace all spring and summer,

Most drifting for now into autumn but always
The impatient few, the oldest and the youngest,
Anxious for their different reasons to follow
The imperative of their instinct, and I mine,
All these years my coming part of their going,

Beginning again their passage and mine,
Though mine will be a different leaving,
Circling the ponds, saying now to those
Who stay "it's time, it's time" as I say it too
More often each autumn now to myself.


PASSING THROUGH

Rivers flow, now and then a building
crumbles, a season passes . . .
William Meredith, "Living Statues"

The toppled town sign riddled with rust
And bullet holes and shotgun pellets
Telling all there is to know now, how
The mine played out years before anyone

Now remembers or still notices the tipple
And tailings where not even weeds grow
Or the highway passed it by with no exit
Or the farms and fields were abandoned

By children who had no love of the land
Or each year the river flooded longer and
Higher until only the cemetery on the hill
Kept its distance but no one's memories

And how in those years before the hopeful
And the despairing left one by one by the
Same one road to find some distant dream
Or simply toward some better place to die

Leaving nothing but the stories on the stones.


"TEACH YOUR CHILDREN"

And you, of the tender years
can't know the fears
that your elders grew by
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

The first language was loss, the second sorrow,
this is the last, then
C. K. Williams, "Ignorance"

Without giving it much thought
One of the first things we teach
Our children is to say goodbye
And a gesture meaning letting go
Which is our way of telling them
Nothing stays and all their lives
They will be saying this one word
With all of its different intentions
To someone and to somewhere
And again and again we are given
Each arrival only to take our leave
Until we have come to as far as
We can go together and it will be
The last whispered word we hear,
Knowing only then what it means.