September
Then the flowers became very wild
because it was early September
and they had nothing to lose
they tossed their colors every
which way over the garden wall
splattering the lawn shoving their
wild orange red rain-disheveled faces
into my window without shame
Notes
Where Paul Verlaine surrendered to the sobbing violins of seasonal decline, watching consciousness drift away like a dead leaf on an indifferent wind, Grace Paley catches the natural world in an unashamed, disorderly revolt, flinging itself over the domestic threshold precisely because it has nothing left to lose. The speaking subject breaks open the quiet boundary of the room, demonstrating how impermanence can arrive not as a mournful echo, but as a visceral, rain-disheveled collision of wild orange and red shoving its uncontainable vitality straight through the window. It anchors September’s theme of Echo in the defiant velocity of things returning altered, reminding us that repetition holds a sovereign second wind—a sudden, brazen abundance that splatters the quiet lawn before the frost can impose its silence. #September #GracePale #Echo #fall #Poetry