Poetry by Sharon Whitehill
Now is the season when hummingbirds vanish,
daylight dwindles, and the leaves fall,
a strange season of endings and losses,
colors fading to gray with a blackness behind.
A particular sorrow for her, this heartache,
even if shared by many, akin to the sky grief we feel
at losing the stars, even the brightest invisible now
everywhere but the most rural night skies.
Though more personal, too: a growing awareness
of how fragile her loved ones, family and friends,
this lingering grief for those absent, now or forever,
her people. As precious and ever-present as the invisible stars,
essential to her as signal fires in a storm,
yet everything seems, everything is, so precarious.
Each year it comes, this melancholy, her familiar,
not with the surprise of a window thrown suddenly open
to weather but as her September companion.
Until one day, down the road, it departs to the rattling call
of sandhill cranes overhead, a flurry of cedar waxwings,
and a pair of fawns still dressed in their white polka dots.
Sharon Whitehill is a retired English professor now living in Port Charlotte, Florida. In addition to poems published in various literary magazines, her publications include two scholarly biographies, two memoirs, two poetry chapbooks, and a full collection of poems. Her chapbook, THIS SAD AND TENDER TIME, is due winter 2024.
