THOUGHT(S) FOR THE DAY

[becke_davis]

Are you a vintner, Choisya? I've never tried that, but apparently Ohio does have some fairly good vineyards -- I never knew that until I moved here.

I love the verses you quoted. Here's another one:

"The sweet calm sunshine of October, now
    Warms the low spot; upon its grassy mold
The purple oak-leaf falls; the birchen bough
    drops its bright spoil like arrow-heads of gold."
-   William Cullen Bryant

[Choisya]

When my children were in their teens we lived in a large house with a cellar and I made lots of wine then but I do not have the room in my present home so the grapes just get eaten or stewed with apples.  Wine making is an absorbing hobby, especially for a gardener since so much of what we grow can be made into wine.  Two successful wines I produced were sparkling Roses from rose petals, and from strawberries.  I also had a large Mavro vine arbour left behind by previous Cypriot owners and that produced fine reds. 

Nice verse. although October has not come in 'sweet and calm' here - it is cold and windy! 

I am friendship, the comforter;

I am that which forgives and forgets.

The Spirit of Wine. 

(W E Henley, British writer 1849-1903.)

And

Wine comes in at the mouth

And love comes in at the eye;

That's all we shall know for truth

Before we grow old and die.

I lift the glass to my mouth,

I look at, and I sigh.

(William Butler Yeats 1865-1939.)

[becke_davis]

October came in cold and rainy and nasty in Chicago, but it turned much nicer yesterday. Now that I'm back home, it's clear blue skies and at least 10 degrees warmer than the Windy City was.

Here's one for today:

"October is marigold, and yet
A glass half full of wine left out

To the dark heaven all night, by dawn
Has dreamed a premonition

Of ice across its eye as if
The ice-age had begun its heave.

The lawn overtrodden and strewn
From the night before, and the whistling green

Shrubbery are doomed. Ice
Has got its spearhead into place.

First a skin, delicately here
Restraining a ripple from the air;

Soon plate and rivet on pond and brook;
Then tons of chain and massive lock

To hold rivers. Then, sound by sight
Will Mammoth and Sabre-tooth celebrate

Reunion while a fist of cold
Squeezes the fire at the core of the world,

Squeezes the fire at the core of the heart,
And now it is about to start."

-   Ted Hughes, October Dawn

[becke_davis]

And, thinking of wine, here's one more:

Go, little book, and wish to all 
Flowers in the garden, meat in the hall, 
A bin of wine, a spice of wit, 
A house with lawns enclosing it,
A living river by the door, 
A nightingale in the sycamore! 

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)

[becke_davis]

Thought you might like the lyrics to this old song, written by Johnny Mercer:

The falling leaves drift by the window
The autumn leaves of red and gold
I see your lips, the summer k...

[Choisya]

---

I love all three of those Becke!  I needed cheering up after more signing-in problems today. 

[becke_davis]

I suspected that might be the case, Choisya. I know Kathy was upset, and I couldn't sign in either for awhile there. Here's another one for today, and some autumn leaves, too:

Change is a measure of time and, in the autumn, time seems speeded up. What was is not and never again will be; what is is change. 
- Edwin Way Teale

[Choisya]

Thanks Becke - lovely cheerful images which I need since now my smileys aren't working either!!!   Words fail me because they would all be rude!    

[becke_davis]

Choisya - Does this help?

[becke_davis]

I saw old Autumn in the misty morn

Stand shadowless like silence, listening

To silence, for no lonely bird would sing

Into his hollow ear from woods forlorn,

Nor lowly hedge nor solitary thorn;

-- Shaking his languid locks all dewy bright

With tangled gossamer that fell by night,

Pearling his coronet of golden corn. 

Thomas Hood, Ode--Autumn

[Choisya]

Naughty naughty Becke!  I am a diabetic!!  Yum. How about some funny food poems.

[becke_davis]

Well, that's the thing about those chocolates, Choisya -- no sugar, and no calories!

Here's a thought for today, but I'll look for some foodie thoughts, too:

Youth is like spring, an over praised season more remarkable for biting winds than genial breezes.  Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.  ~Samuel Butler

[becke_davis]

Strength is the capacity to break a chocolate bar into four pieces with your bare hands - and then eat just one of the pieces Judith Viorst 

Seen recently on a tee shirt ~ EMERGENCY ALERT: If wearer of this shirt is found vacant, listless, or depressed, ADMINISTER CHOCOLATE IMMEDIATELY. 

This guy found a bottle on the ocean, and he opened it and out popped a genie, and he gave him three wishes. The guy wished for a million dollars, and poof! there was a million dollars. Then he wished for a convertible, and poof! there was a convertible. And then, he wished he could be irresistible to all women... poof! he turned into a box of chocolates. 

[Choisya]

ROFL Becke.  Cleo is looking at me strangely as I sit here laughing! 

[becke_davis]

For a change, I found some jokes about autumn:

I got tired of looking at all those leaves in my yard, so I got up off the couch and went into action. I closed the curtains.

Autumn is a season for big decisions -- like whether or not it's too late to start spring cleaning.

A couple goes to an art gallery. They find a picture of a naked women with only her privates covered with leaves. The wife doesn't like it and moves on but the huband keeps looking.

The wife asks: "What are you waiting for?"

The husband replies: "Autumn."

[becke_davis]

  John Keats (1795-1821)

                                 TO AUTUMN.

                                            1.

    SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness, 
        Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; 
    Conspiring with him how to load and bless 
        With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; 
    To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, 
        And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; 
            To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells 
    With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, 
        And still more, later flowers for the bees, 
        Until they think warm days will never cease, 
            For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

                                            2.

    Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? 
        Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find 
    Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, 
        Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; 
    Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep, 
        Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook 
            Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers: 
    And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep 
        Steady thy laden head across a brook; 
        Or by a cyder-press, with patient look, 
            Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

                                            3.

    Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? 
        Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,— 
    While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, 
        And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue; 
    Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn 
        Among the river sallows, borne aloft 
            Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; 
    And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; 
        Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft 
        The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; 
           And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

[becke_davis]

Three Pieces on the Smoke of Autumn by Carl Sandburg

SMOKE of autumn is on it all.
The streamers loosen and travel.
The red west is stopped with a gray haze.
They fill the ash trees, they wrap the oaks,
They make a long-tailed rider
In the pocket of the first, the earliest evening star.. . .
Three muskrats swim west on the Desplaines River.

There is a sheet of red ember glow on the river; it is dusk; and the muskrats one by one go on patrol routes west.

Around each slippery padding rat, a fan of ripples; in the silence of dusk a faint wash of ripples, the padding of the rats going west, in a dark and shivering river gold.

(A newspaper in my pocket says the Germans pierce the Italian line; I have letters from poets and sculptors in Greenwich Village; I have letters from an ambulance man in France and an I. W. W. man in Vladivostok.)

I lean on an ash and watch the lights fall, the red ember glow, and three muskrats swim west in a fan of ripples on a sheet of river gold.. . .
Better the blue silence and the gray west,
The autumn mist on the river,
And not any hate and not any love,
And not anything at all of the keen and the deep:
Only the peace of a dog head on a barn floor,
And the new corn shoveled in bushels
And the pumpkins brought from the corn rows,
Umber lights of the dark,
Umber lanterns of the loam dark.

Here a dog head dreams.
Not any hate, not any love.
Not anything but dreams.
Brother of dusk and umber.

[Choisya]

Now that is my all-time favourite for the Autumn Becke!  Thanks.

---

[becke_davis]

Since I grew up in Sandburg's "city of the big shoulders," I've always been a fan. Glad you like it, too!

Here's one for today - a lot of the autumn verses/poems are melancholy, but I guess that's to be expected.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

by Robert Frost

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold,
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

[becke_davis]

Merry Autumn by Paul Laurence Dunbar

It's all a farce,—these tales they tell 
About the breezes sighing, 
And moans astir o'er field and dell, 
Because the year is dying. 

Such principles are most absurd,— 
I care not who first taught 'em; 
There's nothing known to beast or bird 
To make a solemn autumn. 

In solemn times, when grief holds sway 
With countenance distressing, 
You'll note the more of black and gray 
Will then be used in dressing. 

Now purple tints are all around; 
The sky is blue and mellow; 
And e'en the grasses turn the ground 
From modest green to yellow. 

The seed burs all with laughter crack 
On featherweed and jimson; 
And leaves that should be dressed in black 
Are all decked out in crimson. 

A butterfly goes winging by; 
A singing bird comes after; 
And Nature, all from earth to sky, 
Is bubbling o'er with laughter. 

The ripples wimple on the rills, 
Like sparkling little lasses; 
The sunlight runs along the hills, 
And laughs among the grasses. 

The earth is just so full of fun 
It really can't contain it; 
And streams of mirth so freely run 
The heavens seem to rain it. 

Don't talk to me of solemn days 
In autumn's time of splendor, 
Because the sun shows fewer rays, 
And these grow slant and slender. 

Why, it's the climax of the year,— 
The highest time of living!— 
Till naturally its bursting cheer 
Just melts into thanksgiving.