First day of September...

What a perfect, golden, late summer's day it was yesterday.  Sunny but with a hint of coolness in the air - just beautiful.  Whilst at work I decided I would do some gardening when I got home, which in my case usually means the destruction of something, and this time it was the turn of a California Lilac that was getting too unruly (it was almost pulling the fence over as it was so heavy and leaning to one side, and also keeping the other plants below it in constant shade).  With the aid of a hacksaw, gardening gloves, a few choruses of 'I'm a lumberjack and I'm ok',  and four cats who like to get involved with everything, I managed to remove an offending trunk and dragged it to the other side of the garden for D to do something with (I get bored easily and had had enough of it by then).  Pepper especially found it fascinating.  (The cats now have a page of their own on this blog with their biographies and some pics on it).

Pepper and the California Lilac

And this is Pepper blatantly peeping through a spy-hole in the fence

to see what's happening in someone else's garden.  She knows no shame.

As I always think of September (or late September) as the beginning of Autumn I've been reading poetry with an autumnal flavour.  I'll save Keats etc for later but this is one from Geoffrey Hill called September Song.  It's his elegy to a child that died in the concentration camps, and is one of those poems you can't get out of your mind after reading it.  I first read it about eleven years ago and it's stayed with me ever since.

September Song

born 19.6.32 - deported 24.9.42

Undesirable you may have been, untouchable

you were not.  Not forgotten

or passed over at the proper time.

As estimated, you died.  Things marched,

sufficient, to that end.

Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented

terror, so many routine cries.

(I have made

an elegy for myself it

is true)

September fattens on vines.  Roses

flake from the wall.  The smoke

of harmless fires drifts to my eyes.

This is plenty.  This is more than enough.

Although I'm a great believer in letting a poem speak to the reader personally, and taking your own meaning from it, there is an excellent analysis of this poem at Novelguide.