Autumn is my favorite season with its changing colors and nip in the air. But there’s always a tradeoff. When the clock falls back, we lose the golden hour at day’s end—the price for getting an extra hour of sleep.
Sunlight slants, stingy at 6 p.m.; in November,
I will fall back for an extra hour of shadow,
a false gain against the loss of afternoon gold
with contrails etching and fraying against azure.
The furor of summer buzz dissipated to a hum,
a bee dances with a rugosa rose,
grabbing hold of anthers, clutching at one more hour.
A veteran of Time Inc. and Dotdash Meredith (People Inc.), Catherine Hamrick is the author of The Tears of Things: Poems (Madville Publishing). The lines above are excerpted from the poem “October Martini.”
Hamrick’s poetry has appeared in Appalachian Places, Appalachian Review, The Blue Mountain Review, The Citron Review, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, storySouth, and elsewhere.
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We fell back a week before you. The humans are fine, but the cats are all “Where is my food, my stomach clock says it’s time!”
My cat says that 24/7!