Night Weather – Cross-quarter Day (All Saints Day, November 1)

driving home
on asphalt
hot with brake lights
*****
Picture by Katie Nordt LaRosa, 2010

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Rainy Night and Day

first shower
an inch of puddle
holding the sky

the rain stops
the leaves
keep on falling

dawn fog
lifts the fallen rain
as high as the tree tops

the morning after
street
a long canal of light

red leaves scattered
over the ground
will I find them in spring?

*****

The English quarter days are:

Lady Day (25 March, the Feast of the Annunciation)
Midsummer Day (24 June, the Nativity of St John the Baptist)
Michaelmas (29 September, the Feast of St Michael and All Angels)
Christmas (25 December)

The first edition of Night Weather assigned poems to weeks, not days, so there were no specific poems for the quarter days. But when I was creating the second edition, I had come to realize that there are also cross-quarter days, and that I'd written one poem ("Winter Beeches") set on the quarter day in winter. I decided to add cross-quarter poems to the collection.

The cross-quarter days are: Candlemas (2 February), May Day (1 May), Lammas (1 August), and All Hallows (All Saints) (1 November).

When I was in France, on Toussaint day in 1973 my missionary companion and I went with an older French woman to lay flowers on one or more graves—whose, I don’t remember. It was cloudy but not rainy, like today. In northwestern North Carolina, where my parents are from, churches hold Decoration Day on a Sunday in August (different churches pick different days). Earlier this week, on the day after the funeral, we laid flowers on the tiny grave of a stillborn child—a spray of fresh flowers and a saddle of silk flowers. 

Posted 1 Nov 2024.