Summer’s End
summer’s first light skims
top most limbs of hemlock
incites swallows to their aerobic
labors and peeks under the skirts
of my uphill big leaf maple
angular beams mottle through
elder and salmon berries painting
lime grass nile bottle
greens highlight slug slime
calligraphy on my window glass
agonizingly slow action painters
those banana slugs viscous
Jackson Pollocks trailing glutinous
stories of creation disintegration
and forest floor
sword ferns fronds moving
in the breeze moiré against each other
cast tiger shadows in my bath
stretch spider silk to telegraph
emergency dots and dashes
signal alder leaves to fall
elderberries to redden
insinuate summer’s end
Linda Beeman is an award-winning non-fiction writer and poet living on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound. An independent scholar and former Foreign Service spouse, she writes extensively about South and Southeast Asian antique textiles. Her travel and cultural outreach articles have been published in The Los Angeles Times and the Foreign Service Journal, among others. Her poems have appeared in Pinyon, Windfall and online at Adanna.
Euphony Journal 