| This is a clean my mind worm offering. All week I’ve been thinking how much I love October. On the way there, two poems kept coming up like jingles from a radio ad. After a sleepless night of struggling through how to move past them, I decided just to give them their space and let you take or leave it. This first one is A Vagabond Song by Bliss Carmen, a Canadian. It was a choral reading in Scholastic Magazine in 1957 and for years was memory and performance by various 6th graders: an opportunity for solos and duets and gender groups and community effort. Are there some seventy-nine year olds out there who can say, “Yeah, I remember”? Visually, it is one of the most special evoker of images I know. There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood— Touch of manner, hint of mood; And my heart is like a rhyme, With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time. The scarlet of the maples can shake me like a cry Of bugles going by. And my lonely spirit thrills To see the frosty asters like a smoke upon the hills. There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir; We must rise and follow her, When from every hill of flame She calls and calls each vagabond by name. |
| The next is a more poignant memory. We didn’t watch TV, and David and I read each other, a variety of fiction, poetry, non-fiction over 56 years. We read John Brown’s Body probably three times. However you feel about its historical presentation, the flow of the narrative is amazing. This section was just southern state enough to call to mind a culture I knew, and we could share the words from our mind as we sat in the yard in a twilight evening. Fall of the possum, fall of the ‘coon, And the lop-eared hound-dog baying the moon. Fall that is neither bitter nor swift But a brown girl bearing an idle gift, A brown seed-kernel that splits apart And shows the Summer yet in its heart, A smokiness so vague in the air You feel it rather than see it there, A brief, white rime on the red clay road And slow mules creaking a lazy load Through endless acres of afternoon, A pine-cone fire and a banjo-tune, And a julep mixed with a silver spoon. Your noons are hot, your nights deep-starred, There is honeysuckle still in the yard, Fall of the quail and the firefly-glows And the pot-pourri of the rambler-rose, Fall that brings no promise of snows . . . |
Be on stage. Proclaim a season to an audience or just the surroundings that harbor it. Give life to the moment.
A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver. Proverbs 25:11
Let Me Tell Ya 