Meeker Mornings

Midweek. I find myself muttering “how is it only Tuesday?”

Perhaps your life, too, is a little bit of a whirlwind at the moment. I don’t have time to read long posts (even really good ones), and I definitely don’t have time to write them. Instead, I spend my days on reams of emails, loads of posts in Moodle and Teams, masses of Powerpoints and VoiceThreads. Most of my bandwidth is taken by trying to teach my students wherever they are (in the classroom, streaming, asynchronously learning in some faraway place) and however they find themselves. I’m so glad we’re able to continue to have class, but as a friend said today, the “reservoir of grace” is often not as abundant as one would like.

I have an 8 o’clock class this term. A stretch for this decided night owl. But it means I’m driving to campus in the newly chilly mornings that herald the season’s turning. What things will come in this uncertain time? Hard to say. Another drain on the “reservoir.” But the poems that I share with you today give me another view, another way to understand something the autumn teaches: that the very dependability of the seasons’ change–something so often unsettling in other contexts–is actually a gorgeous reassurance, especially in Mary Oliver’s imagining. We may as well, as Emily Dickinson urges, embrace, even if only in a small, “trinket”-y way, the moments of beauty that this new season has on offer.

Song for Autumn
Mary Oliver
 
Don’t you imagine the leaves dream now
how comfortable it will be to touch
the earth instead of the
nothingness of the air and the endless
freshets of wind? And don’t you think
the trees, especially those with
mossy hollows, are beginning to look for
 
the birds that will come — six, a dozen — to sleep
inside their bodies? And don’t you hear
the goldenrod whispering goodbye,
the everlasting being crowned with the first
tuffets of snow? The pond
stiffens, and the white field over which
the fox runs so quickly brings out
its blue shadows. The wind wags
its many tails. And in the evening
the piled firewood shifts a little,
longing to be on its way.
 
Published in Poetry, May 2005

The morns are meeker than they were - (32)
Emily Dickinson
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 sh'd be old-fashioned 
I’ll put a trinket on.