September 2018/Leaf Koan
almost dusk—color
deepens and rustles insect song–
thick light frosts the wind.
For Colleen’s 100th Tanka Tuesday celebration, she asked us to choose our own words for our poems. I consulted the magnetic Oracle in two ways for my September leaf grid–the online one, and my refrigerator one, which is currently filled with Zen words. Two very different views of the season.
between finding out
and insight lives the whispered
silence of why not
Autumn (after Joan Mitchell)
I am startled by silence
appearing suddenly, grey, tangled, dense–
all color has fallen away,
hanging by whispers to sharp edges and desolation.
I reach for wind–
carry me to fields where sun
returns blue to sky,
calls trees to green.
The NaPoWriMo prompt for Day 18 was to take lines from a poem (backwards, from last to first) and write a response to each line to make your own poem. Since I have been using the art of Joan Mitchell as inspiration this month, I was pleased to find that she had published a poem, “Autumn”, in Poetry Magazine. You can read it here.
November 2017
In this chill
remembering the past–
breath catching
what is gone–
exhaling hard, inhaling
portents and promise
Late with my grid this month too…but then autumn took it’s time to arrive as well. They are promising the first freeze of the season tonight.
And another shadorma for Shadorma November.
Nina is still betwixt and between with her job–as we all know, nothing gets done in a timely way these days. But she will return soon, I promise!
November
…is almost gone, and for the past 5 weeks I’ve been taking a photo each day out my office window. It would have been better I suppose if I had managed to get exactly the same angle and taken it the same time each day, but it still gives a pretty good idea of the process of autumn this year on my little block in NYC.
December next week and 2016 on the horizon…yikes!
Jack in a Leaf Pile

His little blonde head sticking out of a pile of oak leaves; I just had to draw him. Lots of raking going on here and the kids are enjoying it.
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