1500: Summer Nights and Days | Rachel Hadas
"Summer Nights and Days"
Rachel Hadas
So far the nights feel lonelier than the days.
In light, the living keep me company,
and memories of voices through the years.
Each summer threads a green familiar maze.
Emerging sun-struck, you can barely spy
the slow kaleidoscope of clouds and hours.
Those flannel nightshirts chilly sleepers wear
as summer wanes: I'm giving them away.
Pass it on: you keep at the same time.
A bough has broken from the Duchess tree.
Rain swelled the apples. Too much lightness weighs
heavy: the heft of the idea of home
tempered with the detachment of a dream,
or tidal pulls, like ocean, like moonrise.
On this day in...
2011: "Quarter to Six" by Dorianne Laux
2010: "Marginalia" by Billy Collins
2009: "Phone Call" by Tony Hoagland
2008: Weekend, no poem
That's how it is sometimes --/God comes to your window,/all bright and black wings,/and you're just too tired to open it.
Rachel Hadas
So far the nights feel lonelier than the days.
In light, the living keep me company,
and memories of voices through the years.
Each summer threads a green familiar maze.
Emerging sun-struck, you can barely spy
the slow kaleidoscope of clouds and hours.
Those flannel nightshirts chilly sleepers wear
as summer wanes: I'm giving them away.
Pass it on: you keep at the same time.
A bough has broken from the Duchess tree.
Rain swelled the apples. Too much lightness weighs
heavy: the heft of the idea of home
tempered with the detachment of a dream,
or tidal pulls, like ocean, like moonrise.
On this day in...
2011: "Quarter to Six" by Dorianne Laux
2010: "Marginalia" by Billy Collins
2009: "Phone Call" by Tony Hoagland
2008: Weekend, no poem
That's how it is sometimes --/God comes to your window,/all bright and black wings,/and you're just too tired to open it.