At the End of Summer

It is not really the end of summer. In 2025, the autumnal equinox will occur on Monday, September 22 to make it astronomically official. But it does feel like the end of summer seeing students returning to classes, and a few signs of autumn appearing in nature.

Here is the first section of Jane Kenyon's  "Three Songs at the End of Summer"

A second crop of hay lies cut
and turned. Five gleaming crows
search and peck between the rows.
They make a low, companionable squawk,
and like midwives and undertakers
possess a weird authority.

Crickets leap from the stubble,
parting before me like the Red Sea.
The garden sprawls and spoils.

Across the lake the campers have learned
to water ski. They have, or they haven’t.
Sounds of the instructor’s megaphone
suffuse the hazy air. “Relax! Relax!”

Cloud shadows rush over drying hay,
fences, dusty lane, and railroad ravine.
The first yellowing fronds of goldenrod
brighten the margins of the woods.

Schoolbooks, carpools, pleated skirts;
water, silver-still, and a vee of geese."

by Jane Kenyon  -  read the full "Three Songs at the End of Summer" from Poetry

 

 

Though this is not hay, but a Wheatfield With Crows, one of Van Gogh's most famous paintings, it feels right for this time of year. It has often been claimed that this was his final work, and that the dead-end path and the threatening sky with crows heralded his approaching death. That symbolic interpretation is a persistent myth unsupported by concrete evidence.

Image: Vincent van Gogh, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Lying in a Hammock

I was visiting a friend who has a hammock in his backyard. I have never mastered lying in a hammock. I find it hard to get into, harder to get out of and uncomfortable in the time between. But I must be an exception.

Hammocks are an easygoing symbol of relaxation. Sailors slept in them so the rocking ship didn't throw them from bed but just rocked them to sleep.

What do you associate them with - leisure, escapism, luxury, nature?

I wish I could sway comfortably in one and daydream or read or write a poem. The poem that comes to mind is -

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota  by James Wright, from Above the River: The Complete Poems and Selected Prose  

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

An article on atlasobscura.com tells us that:

Just about all of the major early European expeditions to the New World talked about the hammock. Columbus described it in his journal: “Their beds and bags for holding things were like nets of cotton.” Bartolomé de las Casas, the first real European historian to go to the Americas, went on at length about them. In his book Historia de las Indias, written between 1527 and 1559, de las Casas described beds “like cotton nets,” with elaborate, well-crafted patterns. The ends, he wrote, were made of a different, hemp-like material, to attach to walls or poles. 

The early days of the hammock are not well understood, but they certainly did come a long time ago. Woven of organic materials that eventually decompose in tropical environments—where pretty much everything decomposes eventually—hammocks were well established in the Caribbean when the first Europeans landed there. The English word “hammock” derives from the Spanish hamaca, a direct loanword from the Taíno languages of the Caribbean.

A depiction of Amerigo Vespucci landing in America and encountering an indigenous woman on a hammock.
by Jan van der Straet, ca. 1587–89. THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART / PUBLIC DOMAIN

This end of summer lazy day would be a good one for hammocking. But besides my fear of falling out of a hammock, I'm afraid that I view hammock time as wasted time. That's a shame. I need to work on the art of not working all the time. Labor Day, indeed...

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Prompt: The Summer Of

Summer is fully upon us. I was flipping through the anthology Poetry 180: A Poem a Day for American High Schools that was a project of Billy Collins when he was U.S. Poet Laureate and I noticed several summer-title poems. 

To a high school student, summer is some faraway paradise when you are sitting in a classroom. I could imagine myself back in high school English class hearing one of those poems and drifting away to summer past or future.

The poem I settled on for this month is "The Summer I Was Sixteen" by Geraldine Connolly which Collins found in her collection, Province of Fire (1998 Iris Press). It is set at the town pool, but it would work set at any public lake or beach. Her poem is in the Duke-of-Earl1960s but not much has changed in the rituals of summer pool life with sun lotion, blankets on the grass, the snack bar and boys studying girls and girls study boys with an intensity they didn't give to studying poetry in school weeks earlier. I understand those kids looking at:

"thin bikini straps and rubbed baby oil with iodine

across sunburned shoulders, tossing a glance

through the chain link at an improbable world."

In another poem from the collection, "Summer in a Small Town" by Linda Gregg, the voice is older, but still thinking about the opposite sex.

" When the men leave me, 

they leave me in a beautiful place.

It is always late summer."

And in this adult view, we are not looking across a crowded pool and hearing the sounds of kids singing summer songs.

"I swim in the public pool

at six when the other people

have gone home. "

And I might have chosen the more famous poem in the collection, "The Summer Day" by Mary Oliver. No pool here. The voice is having one-on-one time this a grasshopper who she encountered while strolling this summer field.

It makes the speaker wonder "Who made the grasshopper?" and eventually to say that she doesn't know "exactly what a prayer is. "

What she does know, as many poets know, is "how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed."

She concludes with another question - this time more to you than to the universe of a God: "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

For this July, we asked for poems that specifically begin with a title that tells us the age of the speaker (as Connolly does) or the year of the summer that is being written about. That is, write a poem of a specific summer and use the speaker's age or the year itself as the basis for the poem.

Prompt: Summer Haiku

Oiran in Summer Kimono - Attributed to Hosoda Eishi (Japan, 1756-1829) - via Wikimedia

While we are on vacation this month, we are offering a different prompt and submission option. Here we are going to give you a brief summer haiku prompt and ask that if you write a poem to the prompt that you post it below as a comment. All comments on this blog require approval, so there will still be some gentle screening of submissions, but let's assume that everyone can follow the simple rules, will post and will be approved.

We have written here in the past about haiku more than a dozen times, and had specific posts and prompts about spring, autumn and winter haiku. Somehow, summer was overlooked. This month we remedy that.

The haiku form doesn't get the respect it deserves. It seems so simple that it is often used with children as a first formal poetry assignment. But good haiku is not that easy to write.

People notice that many famous haiku poems don't seem to follow the rules we usually hear for haiku verse: three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables. That is both because the classic Chinese and Japanese poets of haiku were not working with syllables and because in translation to English the syllabication is usually ignored.

We will ask you to follow that 5-7-5 in your poems, but perhaps more importantly are some of the other "rules" for haiku.

Most classic haiku follow the culture and influence of Buddhism in the way that the poems emphasize a single moment.

Most haiku focus on something in nature.

In the traditional form, they contain either a direct or indirect reference to a season that turns the reader's attention to the passage of time. They often do this by using a seasonal word rather than naming the season. That seasonal word is called kigo (KEY-GO). In the examples below, the cricket and firefly suggest summer.

Here are a few examples:


The cool breeze.
With all his strength
The cricket.
      ~  ISSA


This warm river
I walk across it
holding my sandals
      ~  BUSON


This hot summer night.
The dream and real
are same things.
     ~  TAKAHAMA KYOSHI


Even a woodpecker
wouldn’t crack the tea hut.
in the summer grove.

Their own fires
are on the trees
fireflies around the house with flowers.
     ~  BASHO


Post your own summer haiku as a comment to this post.

Firefly by  Shoen Uemura - via Wikimedia

Students, go now into summer

For all of you who toil in the classrooms and are wrapping up another year - here's a poem to send you (and maybe your students) out into summer.


First Year Teacher to His Students

Go now into summer, into the backs of cars,
into the black maws of your own changing,
onto the boardwalks of a thousand splinters,
onto the beaches of a hundred fond memories
in wait, where the sea in all its indefatigability
stammers at the invitation. Go to your vacation,

to the late morning cool of your basement rooms,
the honeysuckle evening of the first kiss, the first
dip and pivot, swivel and twist. Go to where
the clipper ships sail far upriver, where the salmon
swim in the clean, cool pools just to spawn.
Wake to what the spider unspools into a silver

dawn dripping with light. Sleep in sleeping bags,
sleep in sand, sleep at someone else's house
in a land you've never been, where the dreamers
dream in a language you only half understand.
Slip beneath the sheets, slide toward the plate,
swing beneath the bandstand where the secret

things await. Be glad, or be sad if you want,
but be, and be a part of all that marches past
like a parade, and wade through it or swim in it
or dive in it with your eyes open and your mind
open to wind, rain, long days of sun and longer
nights of city lights mixing on wet streets like paint.

Stay up so late that you forget day-of-the-week,
week-of-the-month, month-of-the-year of what
might be the best summer, the summer
best remembered by the scar, or by the taste
you'll never now forget of someone's lips,
and the trips you took—there, there, there,

where snow still slept atop some alpine peak,
or where the moon rose so low you could see
its tranquil seas...and all your life it'll be like
some familiar body that stayed with you one night,
one summer, one year, when you were young,
and how everywhere you walked, it followed.

"First Year Teacher to His Students" is by Gary J. Whitehead, from his book Measuring Cubits While the Thunder Claps.

Poems For Summer

The Academy of American Poets has selected a group of poems for summer. I was reading through them yesterday and selected a few to link to here.

• A Green Crab's Shell by Mark Doty   
• Vacation by Rita Dove 
• Insect Life of Florida by Lynda Hull
• Ground Swell by Mark Jarman 
• Fishing on the Susquehanna in July by Billy Collins 
• They'll spend the summer by Joshua Beckman
• Summer Holiday by Robinson Jeffers 
• Rhode Island by William Meredith
• Fat Southern Men in Summer Suits by Liam Rector
• Bed in Summer by Robert Louis Stevenson
• June Light by Richard Wilbur

See the entire list