Colors of home

The polls are closed and the tash is gone. For now.

It is a fine autumn day here in Sweden, but fine Autumn days always make me long for home. New England feels more like home to me in the Autumn than any other time. It makes me wonder why I don't pack up and go. This place just can't compete, in some ways.

This fine day also happens to be a dear freunds birthday. And in her honor, I wrote a poem (oh the humanity!) about being born in the Fall.

Born in Autumn
Born in the autumn while everything else dies.
Born in the imagination of specters gusting down windy roads
Thrown from the cliffs into the sea in tempest
Thrown into the eyes of howling monsters and humble heroes
Lost in sentience under a blanket of orange yellow brown and a little green
Lost in heart-drunk-wonder as the plump apples fall to the earth around you
Singing with the gnats and bees as they mourn for the end of the world
Singing for a bear to slumber through the coming winter with
Dreaming of the music of Spring and white sands in the South
Dreaming away the slow hours while the ripe chestnuts knock against your feet
Awake to the terrible imagination of this season
Awake to a sense of things changing and building to some conclusion
Fly into a tornado of music in swirling crisp leaves and small laughing voices
Fly into the terrible mirror of the sky and weep for what you find
Born in the surging oceanic mists rotating around the globe
Born in the autumn while everything else holds its breath.

And just to make sure due justice is done and homage paid to this most wonderful of seasons, I will let John Keats say it better than I ever could.

To Autumn
1. SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,	5
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,	10
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
2. Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;	15
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;	20
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
3. Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,	25
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;	30
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.