One More Time For Autumn

Poetry Friday this week - with Diane Mayr from Random Noodling)

         This Moment Fills Me

So, I am driving back home with my husband.  

This October seventeenth was chilly and gray and I asked did

he notice the wind soughing through the trees, sending

the leaves through the air, swirling and twirling
along the street, into the gutters and against the windshield?

Late autumn had appeared too soon, and I wished to hurry home

to bring in wood and build a fire and make soup. 

Because of the darkening sky, my thoughts leapt into To Kill A Mockingbird,

remembering Harper Lee’s Halloween scene with the children: 

shadowy woods, wind there too, blowing through the trees,

moving the dead leaves about

with a hand unseen, but felt.  And then Bilbo popped in and

that time early in The Hobbit,

moving off with the dwarfs to the adventures Gandalf had laid out for them,

away from the fields and woods so familiar, the harvest in.

I place myself too into a time of darkness and chill one Halloween

when my fairy costume was covered by a wool coat, the weather

uncooperative on that All Hallow’s Eve for a little girl wishing to be pretty.

That evening now mostly cheer and candy for little children  

is not far from now, that time that seems to turn the season and we say

goodbye to autumn with its trick and treat summer days,

to harvest home and leaves and rakes and squash. 

Colder nights will come, and woolen throws will be upon us,

And we will stay inside and read stories as the outside sleeps.