The Month of the Dead

The day is up, the sun has gained his girth, And in the quartered sky he burns his pace. He lets flow forward on the breathing earth The hot refulgence of his autumn face. But high overhead the shoreling's keening cry Plaintive and dispossessed, compels the ear, Wringing the soul in the protracted sigh Of the earth-fatefulness that shapes it here.

It is deep fall; the season hovers on; It takes the down-curve that will freeze its breath. One in these days cannot but muse upon The coldness and the quietude of death; And know a silence wakeful as the flight Of the hushed earth into its winter night.