The back-to-school month, the month that bridges from summer to fall, Warm days, still, but shorter. The slant of light changes, softens. The day may be hot but the night cools the earth. September is here, and the hillsides still abound with fruit on the blackberry bushes I picked in August.
To compile these monthly collections I read a lot of poems I don't link on the page. A poet may mention September as the date of an event but the poem itself doesn't evoke this time of year. Or it's so archaic I just can't get into it. The ones I link speak to me in some way that may or may not be reflected in the specific lines I excerpt here.
My process includes some research as needed. I recently heard someone hesitate as they started to use the term "Indian summer" to refer to the second summer we sometimes get after a frost in fall. I felt the same hesitation, not knowing if that term (like so many in English) embeds a painful history.
This phrase appears in poems about September and I wanted to know if it gives offense. The words of poetry reflect the understanding and eras of their authors and a poem may have beauty worth savoring, but I stumble on terms that reflect the bias of those times.
Adam Sweeting, the author of a book on the cultural history of the term "Indian summer", tells us yes, it's offensive. In fact, in 2020 the American Meteorological Society issued the recommendation that we refer to "second summer". Sweeting also notes that the idea of a frost followed by a second summer is less likely, given climate change. We're more apt to experience an extended hot period without the cooling temperatures, then plunge abruptly into winter.
I'll indicate below when a poem uses the term.
[Updated to add this] Another term I learned from Island Martha on Mastodon: "Old Women's Summer" is used in Estonia. I couldn't find the background searching so I asked her if it was considered insulting. She said, "Old Estonian women getting a 2nd chance to sit in the sun with their neighbours AND getting credit for it. What do YOU think?" I think it sounds delightful.
"September Meditation" by Burton D. Carley
Perhaps this will be the only question we will have to answer:
"What can you tell me about September?"
"And Now It's September," by Barbara Crooker
The ornamental grasses have gone to seed, haloed
in the last light. Nights grow chilly, but the days
are still warm; I wear the sun like a shawl on my neck
and arms.
"To the Light of September" by W.S. Merwin
and for now it seems as though
you are still summer
still the high familiar
endless summer
yet with a glint
of bronze in the chill mornings
"I haven't met anyone who hasn't offered me her humanity" by Gary Margolis
To see a storm
of maple leaves as the tides they are.
The apples, at home, their own kind
of burnishing, rented pear.
"Porch Swing in September" by Ted Kooser
and a small brown spider has hung out her web
on a line between porch post and chain
so that no one may swing without breaking it.
She is saying it's time that the swinging were done with,
"September Tomatoes" by Karina Borowitz
It feels cruel. Something in me isn’t ready
to let go of summer so easily. To destroy
what I’ve carefully cultivated all these months.
Those pale flowers might still have time to fruit.
"Green Pear Tree in September" by Freya Manfred
He planted it twelve years ago,
when he was seventy-three,
so that in September
he could stroll down
with the sound of the crickets
rising and falling around him,
"September Sunday" by Lucille Broderson
I've done what I can,
picked berries in season,
cut back canes, snapped beans,
scrubbed down the mud-spattered walls.
"September, 1918" by Amy Lowell
This afternoon was the colour of water falling through sunlight;
The trees glittered with the tumbling of leaves;
The sidewalks shone like alleys of dropped maple leaves,
And the houses ran along them laughing out of square, open windows.
"September Water" by Elizabeth Bohm (click the arrow at page right to get the rest of the poem after what begins on this page link)
In the quiet sunlight of September
The harbor's top is blond and burnished stone,
Any swimmer who cuts that width of stillness
Is scorched with cold to the marrow of the bone.
"September 2" by Wendell Berry
up the birds rose into the sky against the darkening
clouds. They tossed themselves among the fading
landscapes of the sky like rags, as in
abandonment to the summons their blood knew.
"The Imprint of September Second" by Ethan Gilsdorf
Second of September, I ate the last berry of summer,
the sun still dreaming it's July twenty-first,
the blackberry bush stiffened by heat, losing suppleness,
the berry hard as corn, the seed living in wisdom
teeth that afternoon, me glancing at the scene
glancing back at me, red leaves against a hard green grass,
"Blackberry Eating" by Galway Kinnell
I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
to the tip of one branch (the others bare
that bloomed crimson last week) slowly turning
red to brown,
"September Midnight" by Sara Teasdale (uses the term "Indian summer")
Let me remember you, voices of little insects,
Weeds in the moonlight, fields that are tangled with asters,
Let me remember, soon will the winter be on us,
Snow-hushed and heavy.
