Summer Goes (Monday Poem)

 by Russell Hoban

Summer goes, summer goes

Like the sand between my toes

When the waves go out.

That's how summer pulls away,

Leaves me standing here today,

Waiting for the school bus.

Summer brought, summer brought

All the frogs that I have caught,

Frogging at the pond,

Hot dogs. flowers, shells and rocks,

Postcards in my postcard box--

Places far away.

 

Summer took, summer took

All the lessons in my book,

Blew then far away.

I forgot the things I knew--

Arithmetic and spelling too,

Never thought about them.

 

Summers gone, summers gone--

Fall and winter coming on,

Frosty in the morning.

Here's the school bus right on time.

I;m not really sad that I'm

Going back to school.

 

 

from The Famiily Read-Aloud Holiday Treasury

Selected by Alice Low

Little Brown & Company Inc, 1991

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

August (Monday Poem)

 by Mary Oliver

When the blackberries hang

swollen in the woods, in the brambles

nobody owns, I spend

all day among the high

branches, reaching

my ripped arms, thinking

of nothing, cramming

the black honey of summer

into my mouth; all day my body

accepts what it is. In the dark

creeks that run by there is

this thick paw of my life darting among

the black bells, the leaves; there is

this happy tongue.

from Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver, by Mary Oliver

Penguin Random House, 2017