The coat without a seam, and other poems

Chapter 42: RITUAL FOR SUMMER DEAD

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About This Book

This collection of lyric and narrative poems moves between wartime urgency and reflective peace, offering sonnets, elegies, and short lyrics that interrogate sacrifice, patriotism, and the yearning for reconciliation. Voices range from public banners and martial images to intimate meditations on grief, domestic memory, and nature. Frequent religious and moral imagery frames contemplations of duty, loss, and the possibility of a unified humanity. Formal variety includes sonnet sequences and freer lyrics, often balancing didactic rhetoric with tender observation to consider how communities and individuals reckon with conflict, remembrance, and the promise of healing.

RITUAL FOR SUMMER DEAD

August turns autumnal now:

Scarlet the sudden maple-bough

At the turn of the wood-road gleams;

On the hearth the gray log sings

Sleepy songs of vanished things—

Babbling, bubbling John-a-Dreams.

August is autumn now.

Find the field where, dead and dry,

Under the broad still noontide sky,

Bleached in the flow of the bright-blue weather,

Stalks of the milkweed stand together.

Take the pale-brown pod in hand,

Packed with seeds of silvery feather;

Wander dreaming through the land.

Let each silken plumelet sift

Through the fingers, drift and drift,

Touched with the sun to rainbow light—

Float—and float—and out of sight!

So might incense drift away.

Golden Summer is dead to-day.

As a pious thurifer

Swing the censer meet for her.