Autumn Scraps and Lamps

Autumn Scraps
Backyard Still Life by Cathleen & Ellie

From Preludes
By T. S. Eliot (1888 – 1965)

#1
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

And then the lighting of the lamps.

Lit

Everyone can’t
be a lamplighter.

Someone must
be the lamp,

and someone
must, in bereaved

rooms sit,
unfathoming what

it is to be lit.

~ Andrea Cohen ~

[See The New Yorker, February 16, 2015]

A week later ~ Nov 27