And so the new collection of poems begins, with the sound of the crickets of late summer. It's a sound I've always loved and something I've always wanted to write about. So, here we are. I'm happy to have found words for my feelings at last.

Crickets

They come as the long light of late summer

Lies drowsing on the dreaming land,

Drumming each day to its death

Among the moving shadows of grass stems,

Chanting the change that only they can feel,

Though the days still dazzle and delight

The rest of us who do not heed their fervent warning.

“Hear! Hear! Hear! Hear!”

Their brisk bodies exhort the witless world

To wonder as the summer wanes,

And

“Here! Here! Here! Here!”

Their peons point to patterns of perishing

That only they perceive,

The need to make new life

As what came before begins to fail.

Listen, my soul, to these singers of summer’s ending,

And heed their urgent rhymes of ruin,

For there is beauty in the dance of death they play,

Fiddling furiously while each day dies in fire,

And letting us know, if we would let them tell,

That there is always death in the beauty of every living thing,

At least for now, at least in this place.

But will they sing so in eternity?

Will their broken song still break the human heart

When change no longer chokes itself,

But deepens life with each mortal movement

We bring to immortality?

Let us pray they will be glorified,

These angels of the coming autumn,

And that they will sing forever and more fully,

Transforming longing into love,

Heralding the ceaseless harvest of hoped-for things.

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