No poems about the Fourth of July in this collection. As I've noted in previous posts in this series, I hunt for poems that say something about the month itself: its place in the cycles of the seasons, the sights and sounds and smells of the Earth's rotation at this particular point in its trip around the sun.
The designation of a month's beginning and end is a human artifice imposed on rotations too big for us to feel, except if and as we tune into those messages from our senses. Some of these are less about July than about something else happening in the poem but they have those lines that capture the rising heat, the baking, the ripening. Some have that sense of the calendar I still feel from my schooldays: June brings the energy of new freedom but with some uncertain weather, back to school looms in August, but July is solidly summer. And it is fire season, as Forrest Gander reminds us in his poem.
"July" by Michael Field
Learn more about the collaboration of two women writing under the pseudonym "Michael Field."
There is a month between the swath and sheaf
When grass is gone
And corn still grassy;
When limes are massy
With hanging leaf,
And pollen-coloured blooms whereon
Bees are voices we can hear,
"July Day" by Babette Deutsch
The afternoon sways like an elephant, wears
His smooth grey hide, displays his somnolent grace,
weighing
The majesty of his ponderous pace against
The slyness twinkling in an innocent eye.
"Morningside Heights, July" by William Matthews
Haze. Three student violists boarding
a bus. A clatter of jackhammers.
Granular light. A film of sweat for primer
and the heat for a coat of paint.
"Breathing Space, July" by Tomas Tranströmer
The one who’s lying on his back under the tall trees
is also up there within them. He’s flowing out into thousands of twigs,
swaying to and fro,
sitting in an ejector seat that lets go in slow motion.
"Moment in July" by Elise Asher
And in my drowsing ears resounds
Time's tick through fleshless spaces
And now slack energies within me faintly stir,
Still, budge budge I cannot budge—
"Answer July" by Emily Dickinson
Answer July—
Where is the Bee—
Where is the Blush—
Where is the Hay?
Ah, said July—
Where is the Seed—
Where is the Bud—
Where is the May—
Answer Thee—Me—
"A Warm Summer in San Francisco" by Carolyn Miller
It was sometime after that, when
the plants had absorbed all that sun, had taken it into themselves
for food and swelled to the height of fullness. It was in July,
in a dizzy blaze of heat and fog, when on some nights
it was too hot to sleep,
"The Ubiquitous Day Lily of July" by David Budbill
There is an orange day lily that blooms in July and is
everywhere around these parts right now. Common.
Ordinary. It grows in everybody's dooryard—abandoned
or lived in—along the side of the road, in front of stone walls,
at gas stations and garages, at the entrance to driveways,
anywhere it takes a mind to sprout.
"July" by George Meredith
Blue July, bright July,
Month of storms and gorgeous blue;
Violet lightnings o'er thy sky,
Heavy falls of drenching dew;
"July Rain" by Tere Sievers
The sudden storm
flashes and rumbles
the ozone air a tonic
for the humid afternoon.
"A Calendar of Sonnets: July" by Helen Hunt Jackson
Some flowers are withered and some joys have died;
The garden reeks with an East Indian scent
From beds where gillyflowers stand weak and spent;
The white heat pales the skies from side to side;
That filled the flowers with honey, and made well
With earliest nectar many a secret cell
Of pulping peaches, with a murmurous tune
Lulled all the woods and leas;
Her dream to the dragon fly,
And the lazy breeze makes a nest in the trees,
And murmurs a lullaby,
It is July.
The long blue torches of the bellflower gleam
Among the trees; and, by the wooded stream,
In many a fragrant ball,
Blooms of the button-bush fall.
Green spring grass on
the hills had cured
by June and by July
gone wooly and
brown, it crackled
underfoot, desiccated while
"The Last Things I'll Remember" by Joyce Sutphen
The partly open hay barn door, white frame around the darkness,
the broken board, small enough for a child
to slip through.
Walking in the cornfields in late July, green tassels overhead,
the slap of flat leaves as we pass, silent
and invisible from any road.
A Year of Poems
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