Under the Harvest Moon: Carl Sandburg

Under the harvest moon,
When the soft silver
Drips shimmering
Over the garden nights,
Death, the gray mocker,
Comes and whispers to you
As a beautiful friend
Who remembers.

Under the summer roses
When the flagrant crimson
Lurks in the dusk
Of the wild red leaves,
Love, with little hands,
Comes and touches you
With a thousand memories,
And asks you
Beautiful, unanswerable questions.

Such beautiful language.

We had a deep red rose growing in our backyard when I was growing up. My dad used to tell the story of how it first grew at the first house he and my mom bought, and then when they bought our house, they dug it up and moved it because they loved this rose so much. It did smell wonderful... and was a perfect deep magenta - not really red, but magenta.

This poem makes me think of sitting out there on summer nights, listening to the wind in the trees, listening to our quiet small-town neighborhood. When I was in high school, sometimes my boyfriend would come over and eat dinner with us, in the backyard. Then we'd sit in the grass, under the mimosa tree, playing with plucked grass, and who knows what we talked about.

I loved the way late summer at my house smelled. Lots of roses. Fresh gardening, preparing for autumn. Cut grass. Fresh peas. The first of the apples falling. Hot baked earth, cooling in the evening air.

I used to take long nighttime walks, looking at the stars as I walked the one mile out to the 'country'. I loved, loved, loved that late summer evening breeze. Standing on the bridge over the creek, listening to the water compete with the rush of rustling leaves. And then, walking on the old road to the fields, and smelling the late-season hay growing.