Poetry Sunday: End of Summer by Stanley Kunitz

Summer does not typically end for us in September. Instead, it lingers through most of October and even sometimes into November and December. Wearing shorts on Christmas Day is not unheard of in these parts. But at the end of last week, we did get a glimpse of autumn and were allowed to hope that 90 degrees F days might be over for a while. Daytime temperatures hovered in the 70s and at night dropped all the way into the high 50s. Higher temperatures will likely return this week, but it has been nice while it lasted.

Stanley Kunitz in this 1953 poem celebrated the changing of the seasons. I was particularly struck by his reference to "the unloved year." If ever a year was unloved, it is 2020.

End of Summer


by Stanley Kunitz

An agitation of the air,
A perturbation of the light
Admonished me the unloved year
Would turn on its hinge that night.
 
I stood in the disenchanted field
Amid the stubble and the stones,
Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me
The song of my marrow-bones.
 
Blue poured into summer blue,
A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,
The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew
That part of my life was over.
 
Already the iron door of the north
Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows
Order their populations forth,
And a cruel wind blows.



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