“Autumn Dusk”….and Happy Thanksgiving!

 

 

It’s Hard To Tell what this photo above is, but the morning brought this weak storm front…and a dark cloud that stretched from the bottom of the horizon.  It transformed Atlanta to the east into a mountain range.  It reminded me of New Hampshire or Pennsylvania.  Quite a sight for the morning, and more spectacular outside my window than in the photo.  But!  A startling and welcome gift for the day before Thanksgiving.  I called around (at before 7am) to neighbors to look to the east outside their doors, and went down to one neighbor, Don to come out with me and gawk at the ‘mountain range’.  Don is a good sport and was as awed as I was.

Thanksgiving is a good time for enjoying the mysteries of Nature….and putting on Copeland’s  “Appalachian Spring”…the music that evokes an earlier, peaceful time when Thanksgiving wasn’t followed by Black Friday.

Peace to my nation in a time of outrageous turmoil, chaos, and Happy Thanksgiving for those of us who still give thanks.

Lady Nyo

And just for the fun of it, pix of my kitchen, and the sacrificial pumpkin from Halloween now to be a pumpkin pie.

By the way, it’s a ‘pink’ pumpkin, though it shows up darker in this photo.

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 This Autumn, a fleeting, transitory season, has brought heavy snows and bone numbing cold across our country.  Too early for this, but here in the South, it was just record breaking temps and rain.

Yesterday we had heavy winds, rain across Georgia and some areas had tornados. When the rain finally stopped, I looked outside and a huge rainbow spanned the sky.  What a visual gift to lift the spirits!  Then the clouds broke apart, their bellies turned pink and a soft blue mingled with the clouds.  Only a scant few minutes before dark fell, but what a Gainsborough moment. 

All week I have listened to the migration of Sandhill cranes, not seeing them, too high up, but hearing their cries. It signals the Winter to come, the smell of wood smoke and a landscape that is swept of fertility, just waiting the Earth to pirouette again.

Lady Nyo

AUTUMN DUSK

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Stuttering winds blow across

Clouds tinted by the failing sun.

Brittle air softens,

Now a faded blue–

Shade of an old man’s watery eyes.

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A late flock of Sandhill cranes lift off,

Pale bodies blending in the

Twilight with legs

Flowing dark streamers,

Their celestial cries fall to

Earth–

A harsh, chiding rain.

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The trees in the valley

Are massed in darkness

As waning light leaches

Color from nature,

Creeps from field to hillock

And all below prepares for the

Rising of the Corn Moon.

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Even frogs in the pond

Listen between croaks

For the intention of the night.

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Jane Kohut-Bartels

Copyrighted, 2014,

“Autumn Dusk” originally published in “White Cranes of Heaven”, Lulu.com, 2011