I wish I could share so many of the lovely poems of autumn, the poems that tell of ripening apples and smiling sunflowers, brisk and crispy air, the laughter of children going to school, the ending of glorious summer and the beginning of a fruitful and colorful fall. But this year I just can't. From one corner of the country to another communities are on fire, cities are under water, hospitals have no room for more sick, people are dying from heat prostration and states are bent on punishing those who have learned to breath free. Read more about The Dying Garden

A Calendar of Sonnets: July Read more about July Can Be the Longest Month

Why Was June Made?
by Annette Wynne Read more about Why June?

There is May in books forever;
May will part from Spenser never;
May’s in Milton, May’s in Prior,
May’s in Chaucer, Thomson, Dyer;
May’s in all the Italian books:—
She has old and modern nooks,
Where she sleeps with nymphs and elves,
In happy places they call shelves,
And will rise and dress your rooms
With a drapery thick with blooms.
Come, ye rains, then if ye will,
May’s at home, and with me still;
But come rather, thou, good weather,

by William Shakespeare Read more about Sonnet 98

March*
Emily Dickinson Read more about March

A Calendar of Sonnets: February
Helen Hunt Jackson Read more about Sonnet for February

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
By Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

To my almost certain knowledge, I learned this song as a small child as we did go over the river and through the wood to grandfather's house for Thanksgiving. Grandfather's house would have been the Home Place, as my grandparents called it. And the sleigh was an automobile of an early 1940's vintage. And it was Iowa, so there was snow. There was probably pumpkin pie. I don't remember much else, but this song has always meant Thanksgiving to me and not just because of the title. There was a river, and there was a wood, and there was certainly pumpkin pie. Read more about Over the River

For some reason, the images of "weak hold," "slip out," and "dying miser" spoke to me this week. All due apologies to my maple tree.

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Maple Leaves

by Thomas Bailey Aldrich Read more about I See Politics