the gates of summer

The gates of summer, once open wide like the arms of absent friends

begin to close, haltingly, with rusty hinges creaking in cool mornings.

 

The fireflies that rose in steaming clouds from humid backyard lawns

have disappeared overnight as though deported to another country,

leaving thrumming cicadas overhead, pulsing like high voltage wires.

 

Now great baskets of tomatoes, sunset crimson and dusky orange,

delicate raspberries, their jeweled caps painting picking fingers purple,

with seeds like tiny pearls, sweet and tart with days of rain and sun,

await the sauce pots and canning jars to hold their garnet ripening.

 

The pressure of the dimming light to hold to growth and life a while longer

knowing that surrender to the dark will come, that gates must close as well as open.

 

from "summer's end" by holin kennen

Done