By R. David Fulcher
Autumn has always held a special magic for me, a season in which the poet John Keats aptly described as “a season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.”
Indeed, if there is an hour for magic, it strikes in the crisp dawn of an early Fall day. And further, if magic has a language, surely its language is poetry.
So I find this an appropriate time to post some of my own verse (hopefully imbued with magic itself) for your reading pleasure.
The first poem is “Ode to the Night”, and it hints at the darker aspects of this time of year, a time when pumpkins cast you crooked smiles and ghosts and goblins are generally free to roam:
Ode to the Night
To the Night, the Night, the dark delight,
The children sleep soundly in gentle white,
Breathing in time with the Raven’s flight.
To the Night, the Night, the waxen moon,
Audience of one to the witches’ croon,
Driving the tides for the sailors’ doom.
To the Night, the Night, its starlit fires,
Which guide the ghosts from funeral pyres,
Which soften the Harpy to play the lyre.
I hope you enjoyed “Ode to the Night”, and at a minimum it puts you into the Halloween spirit!
My second poem is “Melinda”, a story of lost love, and although not directly a tribute to the season was nonetheless designed to evoke a haunted mood:
Melinda
Sometimes in the lonely hours
I would walk the hill
Leaving the clamor and din behind
For headstones gray and still,
As I neared the place where the dead did lie
I knelt and bowed my head
A fool is he who visits the graves
Without homage to the dead,
‘Melinda’ read the stone I sought
Melinda, my betrothed,
Only a thief as clever as Death
Could steal the health of Melinda, my love
Often I hear Melinda’s voice
Soft upon the breeze
I answer her call of eternal love
And grow hoarse among the trees.
I hope you enjoyed “Melinda”! Last but not least is an ode to a much maligned creature, a symbol of the undead, but in reality a beautiful animal that sustains our ecosystem. This last poem is called “The Bat”:
The Bat
Taking inverted Sabbath in the caverns of Carlsbad
I measure time in locust-breath and calcite drip,
My bird-chest rising and falling with the gentle tides
Of this black carpet of brotherhood.
Footsteps fill my dreams,
Sun-bleached tourists groping into the cavern’s belly
To enter the sublime,
Their voices like a million valves releasing pressure.
For an instant they will recognize the face of God in this hard darkness,
The stalactite points of his beard,
The cascading rock formations of his brow,
And that fraction of animal intellect will rush forth,
Freed from concept and equation,
To join our ranks as we veer through this Jerusalem darkness
Toward dusk and sustenance,
Toward the amphitheater where they wait for their own departure.
Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed these odes to the season and wish all of you a sublime Autumn.
-R. David Fulcher, Founding Member of Old Scratch Press
OLD SCRATCH PRESS 