Summer Evening

A poem for summer and the magic it brings

I took this on a different evening than the one that inspired this poem, but all summer evenings tend to blend into one another.

Hello friends,

It’s summer, and it’s raining a lot. It’s so beautiful when the sun sets on a freshly hydrated world, and I had to write about it. I started this as a regular post, but the more I wrote, the more the words wanted to become a poem. Here’s what emerged.

---

After a rain, in the twilight
of the setting sun
in the now clear sky, the world
shows me more shades of green
than I thought possible. 
Fresh leaves of jasmine shine
like limes next to the deeper emerald
of their more mature brethren. Darker still
are the stoic live oak offerings, spreading
their shade over the yard like an embrace.
Spanish moss, so desaturated 
as to be more grey than green, hangs
like streamers at a party, saying
celebrate, for the world is more beautiful this way.

The magic hour is upon us now.
The golden melt of the low sun
drips off the trees like so much rain.
Jewel-bright Spanish needles and muted ferns
sag under the weight
of what the clouds left behind.
Yet even in their drooping, they thank
the cool shower of evening, basking
in the reprieve from the summer heat.

Green becomes orange-yellow
as the sun bends light
to its changing whims.
It coats the world in gold dust
and leaves the mundane sparkling.

I’m so tired.
The sun is saying goodbye
and I’m saying take me with you.
But it doesn’t, and I’m left
alone in the fading. The dim glow
that comes after feels like
an exhale, a sigh of resignation
and relief. The horizon swallowed the sun
and left me as an afterthought.
A breeze sweeps through
and caresses the puddles
left behind with me, rippling
like whispers made real.

Cicadas invite the darkness down,
bridging the gap between day’s blue
and night’s black. They sing
with the crickets and the nightjars
waking. And somehow, the inky dark
is as magical as the departed light.
Shades of black tumble into each other
like crashing waves, like secrets
we can’t say when the world
is illuminated. But if
I let my eyes adjust, I can still see
the gold dust shimmering.

---

Until next time,
Yardena

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WEEKEND POTPOURRI:

• Currently on repeat:

• Birds have dialects, too.

• There’s an interesting tradition of telling bees about death.

• Astronomers may have discovered life beyond Earth, but that discovery acts like a mirror for our own existence.

• A(nother) poem:

THE END OF LANDSCAPE

By Randall Mann

There's a certain sadness to this body of water
adjacent to the runway, its reeds and weeds,
handful of ducks, the water color
 
manmade. A still life. And still
life's a cold exercise in looking back,
back to Florida, craning my neck
 
like a sandhill crane in Alachua Basin.
As for the scrub oaks,
the hot wind in the leaves was language,
 
Spanish moss—dusky, parasitic—
an obsession: I wanted to live in it.
(One professor in exile did,
 
covered himself in the stuff as a joke—
then spent a week removing mites.) That's
enough. The fields of rushes lay filled
 
with water, and I said farewell,
my high ship an old, red Volvo DL,
gone to another coast, another peninsula,
 
one without sleep or amphibious music.
Tonight, in flight from San Francisco—
because everything is truer at a remove—
 
I watch the man I love watch
the turn of the Sacramento River, then Sacramento,
lit city of legislation and flat land.
 
I think of Florida, how flat.
I think of forgetting Florida.
And then the landscape grows black.