Invitation to Intimation

An Intimation of Autumn :

My ‘Own’ Devotional Ode …

By  L.P. - G.

 I

A season’s sweetest feast

Descends, amid cool misty morns;

Through lushly hallowed fields

It treads, besieged by rampant storms. 

August plays the sentinel,

Relieved of farewell norms,
        A leaf burns golden; later, red;

(And hence, September’s born).

    It plots with poise to consecrate
       A fruitful sun we celebrate;
    How does it bring such grace and light

    To dappled harvests, void of blight?
       Ripe crops are seen to richest core;
         Bloating the gourd, through a sweetness thus poured;

       Setting fall’s table and still so much more,

           Until failing buds ‘waken’: freshened… restored.

Hence, fetch latent flowers for every type bee,
Send warmest-wishes on free, bended knee;
          For Summer holds promises right up its sleeve

Of this, (of course): I’ll admit,

I  SO believe!!

II

Yet, Summer sun and Autumn sun, past friendship of a kind;

Whoever seeks their succor-strength may sometimes coolly find
  Both seasons dwelling carelessly along a drafty floor,
     Tresses gently lifted-up by winter’s windy score;
  Or on a half-reap'd furrow-trail, now fast and sound asleep,
      Dipped in shades of poppy-smoke; red-crimson, crisp and deep,
          Dreaming not of fallowed fields, but fertile swaths of flowers:

Watching through the sun’s keen lens, these final oozing hours.
  And sometimes like a helping-hand, one of them, or more,

Embarks on fields grown thick with wheat, returned to nature’s core.
      September spins its sturdy web across a trenchant brook;

      The night-sky, traced by cider-spice, gives one last solemn look.

III

  Way past us now are songs of Spring;

 None thrive in Autumn’s haze;
      Think of them, ‘NOT’; their scents imbued:

Scorched-hot by Summer’s gaze.

 In wailful tones, chilled to the bone,

Cicadas sadly moan,

While lambs bleat-out dejected breath

Whose vapor fades to stone.

      Adrift in pallid rivers spent by summers tossed asunder;
Embraced by light-wind’s rhythmic touch,

       Comes softly pliant thunder.     

Crickets dance with plaintive song,

In trebled cadence, ‘soft’;
Robins meld in mournful tunes

From quiet garden-lofts;
         Gathering swallows twitter still, but also gently sigh,

‘Pure notes of grim dismissal’

Part the late September sky:

  And so it goes, and so it goes;

        (September reaps, what September sows…).

Written by Lisa Porter-Grenn, M.D.

(with all apology to Keats)