When I lived in Appalachia and took daily walks to the church up the road, I noticed the slow, steady changes that come in the fall.  I would circle the church with its two huge maples, ablaze in October color, and drink it in – the bright orange-red, the crispness in the air, the sinking sun reflecting into the clouds.  It was glorious.  One day I couldn’t contain the beauty of my walk so I wrote a poem called “October Song.”  For a long time I loved this poem.  I still love the title. 

Today I discovered it really wasn’t a very good poem.  After searching my many old journals and computer files, I finally came across it.  I thought I was going to set it out here, proudly, for the first day of October, my favorite month.  There were still some phrases I loved.  I described the moon rising before the sun had set:  “so huge and almost surreal, superimposed onto this landscape of Appalachian homes attached to tendrils of smoke.”  That’s not bad but I’m not writing in the line breaks because they were, in a word, ridiculous.  I also still liked this phrase:  “gold-dipped trees, shimmering with light and a beauty that comes only at the height of maturity.”  But I realized that I mainly remembered and loved the experience of those daily walks and the exuberance and delight I felt in writing about it. 

October is a song, one last eloquence before the quiet of winter, and worthy of a poem.  Just not the one I wrote back then. 

So I’m keeping the title and offering up a couple more recent and – I hope – better poems to celebrate this first day of this lovely month.  I hope you like them but if you don’t, the best poem of all is outside.

You Take It Ripe

You take it ripe
that tardy epiphany
like the pear already falling from the tree
when you reach for it
giving itself over to juice
as you bite.
You had given up on hunger
but you remember
watching, staring,
when all you saw
were hard green orbs
stubbornly
clinging to their branches.
The taste is sweet
and
reminds you
why you persist in waiting
attending to hope
ready for grace.

No Snow Fell

In Appalachia I observed snowfall in a secluded wood

and wrote about the one I craved.

Like the place where I was sitting,

no snow fell

where he was present in my life.

I loved the metaphor and him.

Two decades later

in the gentler Blue Ridge

in the heat of summer

where I began to love my husband,

I realized I had known snow in every season

but this one,

my heart transformed by his presence.