In the Mood
by Karla Linn Merrifield

November is most people’s month
of melancholy. I fall with them
into autumn sobriety. Join them
in the ghost gardens, limping down paths
lined with brown stems, gray stalks.
Together we, a silent assembly, stare
at shorn trees, limbs stripped to bare bark.
As a congregation we gather voiceless
beneath overbearing clouds, lowering
themselves over barren fields,
raw clods of earth. No Thanksgiving
hymn rises in our throats; no prayer,
no grace for bounty we cannot taste.
We huddle, we bow to endure
these thirty dark days of the feeble year.



 

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