It feels cruel. Something in me isn’t ready / to let go of summer so easily.
– Karina Borowicz

Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

W. S. Merwin’s beautiful poem To the Light of September landed in my inbox recently. As I read the lines I felt a click of recognition as the poem captured the suspended in-between-ness that this month always evokes in me.

I’ve written before about the notion of liminality (in-between spaces and transitions) and September embodies that sense of being “betwixt and between.”

you who are neither
before nor after
you who arrive
with blue plums
that have fallen through the night

For the past few days, I have been waking up in an uninsulated cabin in a small forest outside Toronto, and feeling the unmistakable “glint of bronze in the chill mornings” that Merwin wrote about.

Here, amidst the trees and open sky, perhaps I have a stronger sense of my connection to the natural world, and able to experience the last remnants of the “familiar endless summer” more directly.

I am acutely aware that September has its own unique beauty, with the leaves turning deep red and orange before falling to the ground and the cooler temperatures inviting me outside for long walks. I usually love the shoulder seasons of spring and fall but there is also something vaguely unsettling about these transitions.  

The shift to cooler weather always catches me off guard, like I’m not expecting the turn in seasons that I’ve experienced all my life. My clothes don’t feel right for the cooler temperatures but I resist the idea of wearing sweaters and socks after months of sundresses and sandals. This is especially true these days, as the prospect of going indoors for the winter signals a loss of freedom to engage with the outside world.

The month of September has always been weighted with mixed meaning for me. Full of promises as well as endings, it has a certain melancholy. September will always be linked in my mind to the start of the school year and a yearning for new pencils and notebooks and the wide open possibilities of starting something fresh. There is something so appealing about a clean slate.

It is also typically the month of the Jewish New Year with its metaphors of turning and re-turning encouraging deep reflection and retrospection. September is bracketed by the Labour Day weekend when the outdoor pools close (truly signaling the end of summer for me) and my birthday, which falls at the end of the month and stands as an unfailing reminder of another year gone by.

Maybe the change of seasons is one of those ambiguous losses (with its accompanying intangible grief) that we often don’t have the words to acknowledge. There are things ending, and things to look forward to. Something lost and something found.

I discovered that along with being a prolific writer, W.S. Merwin was a student of Zen Buddhism and an advocate for the deep ecology movement. His writing often called attention to the destruction of the environment and the ubiquitous loss of nature all around us.

When asked in an interview to comment on the social value of poetry, Merwin said, “One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there’s still time.”

           One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there’s still time.

For Merwin, writing was an attempt to rescue what was disappearing, which makes his poetry a powerful reflection on the changes we are living through as we move into fall.

To the Light of September

When you are already here
you appear to be only
a name that tells of you
whether you are present or not

and for now it seems as though
you are still summer
still the high familiar
endless summer
yet with a glint
of bronze in the chill mornings
and the late yellow petals
of the mullein fluttering
on the stalks that lean
over their broken
shadows across the cracked ground

but they all know
that you have come
the seed heads of the sage
the whispering birds
with nowhere to hide you
to keep you for later

you
who fly with them

you who are neither
before nor after
you who arrive
with blue plums
that have fallen through the night

perfect in the dew