Equinox: Growing Darkness

Two more seasonal favorites
from Philadelphia cartoonist Tony Auth

Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness

Every year we have been
witness to it: how the
world descends

into a rich mash, in order that
it may resume.
And therefore
who would cry out

to the petals on the ground
to stay,
knowing, as we must,
how the vivacity of what was is married

to the vitality of what will be?
I don’t say
it’s easy, but
what else will do

if the love one claims to have for the world
be true?
So let us go on

though the sun be swinging east,
and the ponds be cold and black,
and the sweets of the year be doomed.

by Mary Oliver (b 1935)
Contemporary American Poet
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 1984
Most recently: Swan: Poems and Prose Poems, 2010

this poem found in The New York Times, 5 November 2010

September Morn

by Tony Auth (b 1942), Pulitzer Prize Recipient, 1976
When we lived in Philadelphia, it was always a treat to open the Inquirer around this time of year and see how cartoonist Tony Auth would capture the end of season. Always humorous, yet poignant, Auth knows how to convey that keen sense of sadness that comes with leaving the shore and returning to school, not merely because the fun is over but, more significantly, because life is urging us on at its own pace, not ours.

As C. S. Lewis writes in The Screwtape Letters: "The humans live in time, and experience life successively. To experience much of it . . . they must experience change." Thus, Lewis explains, God has given us the seasons, which strike a balance between our need for change and our longing for permanence: "each season different yet every year the same. . . . always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme."*

Here are a couple more end of summer Auth favorites that I have been saving in my scrapbook for many years. I appreciate Auth's implication that in addition to the inevitability of seasonal change, a bit of each season is always lying just beneath the surface of every other season as well (click on each cartoon here and above to enlarge for details):


Or as my Grand-dad Lindsey always used to say
on the First of September:
"September morn
when the woodbine twineth
and the whacky - doodle mourneth."

~ Thanks to Mark Bass for this explanatory link! ~
www.waywordradio.org/where-the-woodbine-twineth

~ This Google Doodle captures the spirit! ~

Around this time of year,
my brother Bruce always reminds me to listen to
*Mother Earth and Father Time
from the animated Charlotte's Web
~ sung by Debbie Reynolds ~

I think you'll find that it matches right up with
Tony Auth's drawings and the C. S. Lewis passage.