"I am so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers"...

As Anne (with an "e") so aptly observed in Anne of Green Gables, October is such an amazing month.  My family celebrates the autumn splendor each year with a trip to Blue Mounds State Park, where the highest elevation in southeastern Wisconsin promises views all the way to Iowa!  As we hiked the trails yesterday a few favorite poems came to mind--I hope you enjoy them all.  

Happy Monday!

"If you wish to count the Scarlet Oaks, do it now. In a clear day stand thus on a hill-top in the woods, when the sun is an hour high, and every one within your range of vision, excepting in the west, will be revealed." (Thoreau, from "Autumnal Tints")

Nature’s first green is gold, 
Her hardest hue to hold. 
Her early leaf’s a flower; 
But only so an hour. 
Then leaf subsides to leaf. 
So Eden sank to grief, 
So dawn goes down to day. 
Nothing gold can stay. 

~~Robert Frost 

Another year gone, leaving everywhere
its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,

the uneaten fruits crumbling damply
in the shadows, unmattering back

from the particular island
of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhere

except underfoot, moldering
in that black subterranean castle

of unobservable mysteries – - -roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water. This

I try to remember when time’s measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumn

flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay – - – how everything lives, shifting

from one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.

~~Mary Oliver

The morns are meeker than they were,
The nuts are getting brown;
The berry’s cheek is plumper,
The rose is out of town.

The maple wears a gayer scarf,
The field a scarlet gown.
Lest I should be old-fashioned,
I’ll put a trinket on.

~~Emily Dickinson

Every leaf speaks bliss to me, fluttering from the autumn tree... 

 ~~Emily Bronte

 

I cried over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts.

The field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of the copper sunburned woman, 
       the mother of the year, the taker of seeds.

The northwest wind comes and the yellow is torn full of holes, new beautiful things 
       come in the first spit of snow on the northwest wind, and the old things go, 
       not one lasts.

~~Carl Sandburg 

Autumn, the year's last, loveliest smile...

~~William Cullen Bryant