Dorothea Sharp, “A Summer’s Day”
What with Labor Day beginning so late this year, school has started for many and summer is rapidly becoming a distant memory. Here’s a fine Rachel Hadas poem about the end of summer.
As I interpret the poem, Hadas is imagining that we can experience summer in two ways—either taking it slow (as perhaps we did as children) or hanging on with a sense of urgency, knowing that the special time we had set out for “season, project, and vacation” is going fast.
In the first instance, we are the cow from our childhood summer days, who seems to “pace[ ] through her days in massive innocence.” In the second, we are constantly being tested, the way we ourselves test an old hunting knife for its sharpness. And like that hunting knife, we grow duller with each year.
In truth, we can’t be that cow. Our anxieties harangue us with clamorous voice. We are prisoners from the start and imagine disaster “looming above the nervous watch we keep.”
But at least the poem allows us to dream of another way of being.
End of Summer
By Rachel Hadas
Sweet smell of phlox drifting across the lawn—
an early warning of the end of summer.
August is fading fast, and by September
the little purple flowers will all be gone.
Season, project, and vacation done.
One more year in everybody’s life.
Add a notch to the old hunting knife
Time keeps testing with a horny thumb.
Over the summer months hung an unspoken
aura of urgency. In late July
galactic pulsings filled the midnight sky
like silent screaming, so that, strangely woken,
we looked at one another in the dark,
then at the milky magical debris
arcing across, dwarfing our meek mortality.
There were two ways to live: get on with work,
redeem the time, ignore the imminence
of cataclysm; or else take it slow,
be as tranquil as the neighbors’ cow
we love to tickle through the barbed wire fence
(she paces through her days in massive innocence,
or, seeing green pastures, we imagine so).
In fact, not being cows, we have no choice.
Summer or winter, country, city, we
are prisoners from the start and automatically,
hemmed in, harangued by the one clamorous voice.
Not light but language shocks us out of sleep
ideas of doom transformed to meteors
we translate back to portents of the wars
looming above the nervous watch we keep.
