Full Moon Arrives With Friends... Happy Autumnal Equinox!

Jupiter will be making its closest approach to Earth Monday night since 1951, and for about the next four months the giant planet will be teamed up with a distant relative: Uranus.  The fun part is that they'll be all lined up in a row.  I'm mixing my star-gazing and moon-bathing with that phenomenal full moon tonight.  I have a few Moonflowers left and am just seeing the Sphinx Moths coming to drink from them.  A few leaves are changing to yellow or brown, but not many.  It's been dry for the whole month and my grass is crunchy and dry.  We need a few days of long, slow showers.......

A photo of my Moon playing in the leaves of my Water Oak.  The Moonlady gets shy sometimes.

Pearl in Black Velvet

By: Marion

For September Full Moon
Shining in my picture window,
mistress of the night---
Full of ethereal mystery
and pearlescent, ambient light.

My life’s one devoted
and constant, dutiful love,
a beautiful, blameless being,
my soul’s not worthy of.

Others were never faithful,
their hearts---seldom true,
but every month, throughout my life
your presence leads me through.

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Another delicate, luminous Moonflower from last night, fully opened.  I can't resist their delicate blooms... I found this poem below by a new poet and I share it here.  Happy sky gazing!  Love & Blessings----

MOONFLOWERS
by Karma Larsen

For Milly Sorensen, January 16, 1922 - February 19, 2004

It was the moonflowers that surprised us.
Early summer we noticed the soft gray foliage.
She asked for seedpods every year but I never saw them in her garden.
Never knew what she did with them.
Exotic and tropical, not like her other flowers.
I expected her to throw them in the pasture maybe,
a gift to the coyotes. Huge, platterlike white flowers
shining in the night to soften their plaintive howling.
A sound I love; a reminder, even on the darkest night,
that manicured lawns don't surround me.

Midsummer they shot up, filled the small place by the back door,
sprawled over sidewalks, refused to be ignored.
Gaudy and awkward by day,
by night they were huge, soft, luminous.
Only this year, this year of her death
did they break free of their huge, prickly husks
and brighten the darkness she left.

 ^^^^^ +++++^^^^^+++++^^^^^ +++++^^^^^

October's Party

October gave a party;

The leaves by hundreds came -
The Chestnuts, Oaks, and Maples,
And leaves of every name.

The Sunshine spread a carpet,
And everything was grand,
Miss Weather led the dancing,
Professor Wind the band.


~George Cooper, "October's Party"

+++++*****+++++*****+++++*****+++++*****+++++

The Autumn of My Life

The Wind Cries Mary by Jimi Hendrix

Jimi Hendrix, one of the greatest poet/songwriter/singer/guitarists who ever lived.

+   +   +   +   +   +   +   +

The Wind Cries Mary

By Jimi Hendrix, 1967 from “Are You Experienced” Album

After all the jacks are in their boxes
And the clowns have all gone to bed
You can hear happiness staggering on down the street
Footprints dressed in red
And the wind whispers Mary

A broom is drearily sweeping
Up the broken pieces of yesterday's life
Somewhere a queen is weeping
Somewhere a king has no wife
And the wind, it cries Mary

The traffic lights they turn up blue tomorrow
And shine their emptiness down on my bed
The tiny island sags downstream
'Cause the life that lived is, is dead
And the wind screams Mary

Will the wind ever remember
The names it has blown in the past
And with his crutch, it's old age, and it's wisdom
It whispers no, this will be the last
And the wind cries Mary

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I love every song on the "Are You Experienced" album, but this one is a favorite.  Hendrix had no equal as a a poet and guitarist.   If you've never heard this song, you can check it out at YouTube.

What's your favorite Jimi Hendrix song?

Two Poems to Welcome September

My Cockscomb bloomed!

Kindness

By Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

=============================

The Patience of Ordinary Things

By Pat Schneider

It is a kind of love, is it not?

How the cup holds the tea,
how the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
how the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
or toes. How soles of feet know
where they're supposed to be.
I've been thinking about the patience
of ordinary things, how clothes
wait respectfully in closets
and soap dries quietly in the dish,
and towels drink the wet
from the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?

======================

The Hummingbirds are emptying my 3 large feeders twice a week now.  They're fueling up in droves for the trip further South.  I can feel them taking Summer with them, bit by bit, on their tiny, strong wings.  I'm already nostalgic for summer and she hasn't even gone...

Happy September.

Blessings,

~Marion