Season’s End
by Audrey Colasanti
(published in Humana Obscura, Fall/Winter 2021)
All around, the grasses sway copper and flax,
warm and honeyed; a thousand phantom
cicadas zither their wings in vibrating
song, The tips of the nodding sedge have turned
pink, the timothy and heather to pewter
and tin. The air, filled with the scent of dust
rising, sticky in the heat. Grasshoppers dart
across bristly plumes, clicking their heels—
the rhythmic hum and buzz of summer’s end—
bees and bees sucking at the triumph of it all.
Last Sunday, I posted a poem by Ruth Stone, in which she brilliantly gives readers a character study of Aunt Maud. I hoped to find an equally wonderful poem about an uncle and--as I am working on about 4 hours of sleep and lots of stress--I needed to find it fast, providing a companion piece to Stone's. I found many uncle poems, a few that are memorable, but all of them were depressing, creepy, and/or long.
So I went into a different direction. I went to Humana Obscura's site, as I always enjoy the poems they publish. Audrey Colasanti's "Season's End" was the first one I read; besides being fitting for mid-September, it is a great poem.
The words the poet uses to describe the end of summer are not just vivid, the ones that are colors are both bright and shiny and metallic and (as far as the words sound) often harsh. This does seem like the perfect description of summer turning into autumn--it is beautiful and hard. The air is both sticky and dusty, again pulling us in different directions but making absolute sense for the end of summer.
The three animals mentioned (cicadas, grasshoppers, bees) are much the same--blessed, welcome, and joyful symbols to some and annoying, destructive, and painful to others.
This nature poem does what great poems should do--it goes beyond what is on the page. Yes, it is a nature poem, but it says much beyond its images and descriptions, and it is because of the poet's choice of images and descriptions that we readers are led beyond.
(Walt Whitman, I think, would like what Colasanti did here. After all, Whitman said it best: "I am large, I contain multitudes.")
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