Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Falling Silent


And now comes the best season
   Not yet the brilliant leaves,
      The pumpkin and the cranberries,
         The fragrance and the crackling underfoot.

No. This is the hour of silence.
   The muffled whispers and the white stillness
      The hazy rivers and the haunted shadows
         Now is the season of the mist

Drifting along the surface of the ponds,
   Rising in a curtain across the fields
      Revealing hidden streams

Unfamiliar phantoms fill the farmyards.
   Fog swirls and thickens.
        The traveler, lost a mile from home,
            Finds himself forsaken in an unknown world.

And the swamp, mysterious on the most prosaic days,
   Yields herself to the enchantment,
      Waits as the ghostly wisps weave themselves through her branches,
         Now concealing, now revealing
            Her deepest secrets.

Further along the road, a tree-encircled field
   Becomes a giant bowl that fills with clouds
      that rise
         and build
              and spill
Like smoking incense from a thurible
   Pouring a last cool benediction across the road
      Before the sun’s heat burns the mystery from the day.


AMDG

12 comments:

  1. That's very beautiful. The picture, too. Or maybe I should say both pictures.

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  2. Thank you. I risked my life for the one at the bottom.

    AMDG

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  3. Very evocative, Janet. I feel as though I've been there. (In fact, I wish I was there right now.)

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  4. Thanks. You would probably be warmer and I would take you to dinner.

    AMDG

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  5. You have many talents, Janet. This is beautiful.

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  6. Janet, this is gorgeous. And the poem with it. Thank you so much for linking up with me. Your picture makes me homesick for Mississippi.

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  7. "last cool benediction across the road" ...lovely!

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  8. Thank you all. For some reason Blogger held your comments for moderation. Maybe because it's an older post. But anyway, I appreciate them more than Blogger does.

    AMDG

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  9. Cari, I really love living here and being able to drive by all these fields every day. That park where you went when Janice was visiting looked pretty darn nice, though.

    AMDG

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