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.