Wednesday Wisdom: Take Time to Praise the Sights and Sounds of Autumn
I speak this poem now with grave and level voice
In praise of autumn, of the far-horn-winding fall.
I praise the flower-barren fields, the clouds, the tall
Unanswering branches where the wind makes sullen noise.
I praise the fall: it is the human season.
Now
No more the foreign sun does meddle at our earth,
Enforce the green and bring the fallow land to birth,
Nor winter yet weigh all with silence the pine bough,
But now in autumn with the black and outcast crows
Share we the spacious world: the whispering year is gone….
— Archibald MacLeish, “Immortal Autumn” (excerpt)
Source (MacLeish poem excerpt): Archibald MacLeish, “Immortal Autumn,” in Collected Poems 1917-1982. Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1952. Copyright ©1985 by The Estate of Archibald MacLeish. (For the full text of this poem, please visit the Poetry Foundation’s page for “Immortal Autumn.”)
Source (crow photo): “Murder at Breakfast, v. 1,” (Walnut Creek, California, October 2019). Copyright ©2019 by Laurie Snyder. All rights reserved.
