As summer willows away

UP THE WALK The red rowboat is sunning itself on empty music.

Moonlight is the eye which hides your face. Daylight was the other.

The air is cool lagging against itself like autumn wisdom children of birds color of air what will rouse them?

Late leaves are trying to memorize the late flowers. Mary Elizabeth Perez

SEPTEMBER I know about the speed of light but when I part the curtains and push night's window up crickets chime close to song and dark's long tendrils weave through screens.

What is the speed of dark when light's extinguished? And when field crickets stop and silence sounds, how deep, how full the ringing, how quickly quiet's gone. Susan Roney-O'Brien

WALKING TO WORK You have time between one step and the next

To notice the sparrows feeding on the white berries of the red osier dogwood,

To discover the dew of the cold night still strung in droplets along the spiderwebs,

To see how the maple leaves shadow one another, kaleidoscoping in wind,

To admire the light-blue wild asters filling the neighbor's yard with slow-moving bees -

And you as slow in the brisk fall air, still a mile to go! Robin S. Chapman

PAUSE IN SEPTEMBER This year the change comes early, near equinox. Sky's blue

pulls back a bit on the first morning of frost on the lawn. Something in the air

lightens, and the sun's rays seem to glance off the skin.

Though we are warm, we reach for sweaters for a drive through canyons - still thick with greenery.

But autumn moves down from the mountaintops, crisping into gold and orange, the reds of last heat before that long letting go. Dixie Partridge

(c) Copyright 1999. The Christian Science Publishing Society