Monday Random: I heard it on the radio

• The radio has been a part of my life for a long time.
• There was nothing mystical about it then,
• it was merely the sounds in the car of my dad’s talk radio and Christian sermons
• and the music in my own room of top 40 hits played incessently.
• I hear some of those songs now and I think, ‘whoa, that’s good music!’
• Why did I hate some of it so much?
• It could be because they rammed the same five songs down our throats!

This is My Father’s World

Happy Thanksgiving to the states, happy end of autumn to everyone else. I wonder if this wasn’t the most beautiful autumn ever here in the Great Lakes, or maybe I was just paying more attention.

***

I look around at the multi-coloured trees in wonder. How come this happens every year, yet it is is always a marvel, always a pause in the day? When I first look up and see a tree has started to change, I feel a seed of excitement. It grows as the weeks go by, with each stroll or drive, watching the fields turn golden. Pure gold, the sight of it. I have lived in places with four seasons for 59 autumns. Still, it is always new.

God has created this world beautiful, to change and grow in harmony. Autumn is the bridge to winter, yet I feel so alive. When the sun starts to go down and sets the top of the church on fire, I don’t know where to look. I turn slowly in my landscape to take it all in, ever changing with each moment, until the light has gone.

When I go home, I take handfuls of leaves with me, as if they will last, as if they will not curl up, dry and crumble, like before. They are souvenirs of a majestic day, and I press them in yet another coffee table book, to look at in the dead of winter, and remember how it felt to walk with the one I love, kicking up the leaves.

red leaves fell
stowaway on my shoe
little hitchhiker

***

Title from the Christian hymn, This Is My Father’s World
words by Maltbie D. Babcock, 1901
music, traditional tune arrange by Franklin L. Sheppard, 1915

View of the church of Saint Paul de Mausole, Vincent van Gogh

Wake more than sleep

Waking over and over
each a new experience
every travel back to sleep

a new dream–
a place to hang my hat

until I do not know
am I awake? or
am I asleep–
were those exploits
real
in the dark, or

did I only pass by them
and through them

like phantoms–

Share this:

chopping celery
the broth simmers
I have made this soup for you
since we were 25
will you still eat it
when we are old–

Davenport picture show

He would like the air quiet
when he partakes of his supper
so that he can hear the news, still
her voices lurk in the shadows
of their modest home
to the sound of a tinny piano
behind doors, and at times
emboldened
over their heads
at the kitchen table

He says, ‘I want to be alone with you,’
when they sit later, reading
and she smiles, and rises
bringing him a piece of pie
comforted in the murmuring crowds
surrounding their daily routine
filling the empty rooms
that grown children had long ago
abandoned

Cutting the last wedge of pie
on Thursday, for his lunchbox
she begins a shopping list
to prepare for the following week
listening to the whispers in her ears
of sprites and ghosts and back
alleyway detectives
about what the autumn will bring

cool breezes, and
the voices of all the leaves

plummeting