We begin September in summertime and end the month in autumn. No matter the season, it is to poetry I look for comfort, direction, and joy. Here is the last stanza of Tamara Madison’s poem “Summer”
And then it’s September:
a cheap and painful parody
of summer – hotter than August
but the days grow shorter
and we are stuck wherever
we have to be as wildfires
devour the hills of spring
leaving us pining for July
when time stretched out
before us on the sand,
naked and smiling.
—read the rest of Tamara Madison’s Summer
A few days into a three-week vacation, on a train with friends returning from a day-trip to Florence to the house we were sharing in Chianti, having seen Michelangelo’s David, having eaten a fine lunch with wine, we were laughing and talking amongst ourselves, when an American woman sitting close by said, “Obviously, you haven’t heard the news.” It was September 11, 2001.
When I went to bed that night, after frantic phone calls home and hours of watching TV coverage in Italian, I longed for words of solace that might usher me to sleep. My husband had been killed three summers before under the wheels of a DUI driver. I had already lost faith in a benign world. I longed to chant familiar words, but hadn’t learned much of what I knew and loved by heart. Lines by an ancient anonymous poet became my mantra:
Western Wind
Western wind, when will thou blow,
The small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!
Among the other half-remembered poems, were these lines from W.H. Auden: “About suffering, they were never wrong. / The Old Masters: how well they understood its human position; how it takes place / while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” How perfectly those words captured our own obliviousness to what was going on across the Atlantic while we were having fun. The times we are living in now are fraught, and bring W.B. Yeats to mind: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”
Packing for any trip is difficult, full of tiny questions: will the predicted weather hold? Which shoes will not blister tender feet? But, what I am certain will always be useful are the words that comfort and guide us into the unknown, which is after all, though we might wish it otherwise, the only place we travel.
James Crews finds some end-of-summer joys to savor. Wherever I travel I am comforted by his wise words.
Fleeting Taste of Summer
The last of the strawberries softening
in the plastic Cool Whip container
in which my mother-in-law delivered them
last night, having picked each one herself.
Dusty leaves trimmed, the berries sliced
then eaten with Greek yogurt and honey,
fleeting taste of summer going, going,
now gone. Outside, the high-pitched,
whining cries of juvenile crows not quite
able to caw, but calling to their mother
and father across the foggy branches,
as I sometimes call to mine through the air
in which they seem to live. They too are
still teaching me how to be here, how to
love and lose and feast on this one life
while I have breath to do it, leading me
even now through the door, so I can feel
the shock of cold, wet grass on my feet.
—from James Crews’s forthcoming book The Sacred Everyday Poems of Peace and Stillness
It rarely rains in summer in Southern California where I live, but one summer day it did while I was making a pie.
Instructions for Pie
Treat dough gently, love it
like the baby in your dreams.
Chose fruit of the season:
today peaches, tomorrow,
apples will be green.
And, always, there are lemons.
Come a sudden summer rain,
meringue falls like a hill of snow.
Don’t despair!
The filling will still be delicious
with soft, tart, sweetness below.
—Donna Hilbert, from Threnody, Moon Tide Press, 2022
Your Turn
What poems might you learn by heart? What poem might spring directly from your heart to give to someone who might need just what you have to offer?
Post and post images by Donna Hilbert. Photo by Pacheco, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Full poems used with permission.
- Poet Laura: By Heart - September 9, 2026
- Poet Laura: Summer’s End - August 5, 2026
- Poet Laura: One Fine July Day - July 8, 2026
L.L. Barkat says
Oh, goodness. I came on the perfect day to read this. Thank you for your tender reflection.
“Instructions for Pie,” of course I love it. (Ran it in Every Day Poems! 🙂 )
And that ancient poem is starkly beautiful.