Poem: "The Turn" by Pamela Harrison

 The Turn

In the dog days of August, when birdsong defers
to the drone of locusts and grasshoppers spring
sideways from her step, she stops. Turning in a slow
circle, her palms open and upraised to the slanting
light of late afternoon, she calls to all her gardens,
“Now, my lovelies, you’re on your own.” Quitting
her weeding and determined dead-heading, she sits
longer in her chair. A gradual slump begins: slugs
eat holes in the skirts of hostas, drying pods bend
the tops of stalks, garlands of wild grapes wizen in
the hedgerow, and the dusty grass turns bleaching
into hay. At the deepening drumbeat of autumn, rot
overtakes the slow retreat of each perennial form.
Bowing to the inevitable, she simply watches and
waits, admiring the ambered light, remarking the
gradual darkening of evening’s early hours. It’s like
riding a long exhalation, the accepting sigh of the
earth’s turn toward sleep. A spoil of rotting leaves
and insects, heavy and louche, collects at the rain
barrel’s bottom. A toad takes refuge in her
overturned boot, and her birthday—entirely apt
that it falls in the midst of this subsidence—passes
blissfully unnoticed, a small forgottenness marked by
the sound of ripe tomatoes thudding softly to the
ground.

LISTEN
Pamela Harrison reads "The Turn"