October is the month the mists draw in.
These calm and freshly silent mornings settle summer
and draw reluctant autumn to our door.
The evening fog falls low on crop-shorn fields
as rolls of rich, mysterious white seep through the emptying hedges
and fall in ragged scraps of soft, pale mist
that scatter loosely at our feet like something worn.
The animals will walk within this now – a second skin –
shielding themselves from hunter and from prey
while we, preparing for the still, small death of winter’s blast
mourn what is concealed – soon to be lost.
Autumn’s enchanted moments come so quickly, and I usually miss them. Your poem comes in August’s heat then rainstorms, however, and I can picture, feel, and delight in October just a bit longer now. I enjoyed each passage building upon the others, just like the layers you describe. Lovely, Anne!
Thank you so much for such lovely feedback! I’ve recently given up my full-time work (as I mentioned in my bio) and now I have a front-row seat to watch the changing of the seasons as they occur around the old farm; it is my pleasure and my joy to try to describe these as aptly as I can!
Excellent Fall moments description.
Thank you! I love working through the sensory awareness of an event!
Sincere, real, tangible to the senses, yet full of richly chosen and expressed language. Very nice.
Thank you, Paul: the seasons are exceptionally important to me and now, living on the old farm full-time, I have a front-row seat to watch the seasons change around me. There’s a timeless beauty in watching one season unfold and stretch and become another season – I prefer this much more gentle timescale to the harried rush and panic of our 24-hour lives!
I love this poem, its rhythms, its idiom, its tone and lushness, as much as I love the month that it describes. Superlative.
Thank you so much! My life has changed greatly this past year – moving from my full-time lecturing work to living on the old farm that my ancestors built in the 1600s. Now I get to watch the seasons change around me – and mornings like this (when autumn is slowly casting its mists along the hedges and I get to walk through fields that are soft with the early light of day) are little short of a miracle. I have no artistic talent (I’m not being coy – I can take photographs but heaven help me if I try to draw something) so my challenge is to ‘see’ with words and transfer that sensory image to others. And yes – autumn is my favourite season!