The End of Summer

By Rachel Hadas b. 1948 Rachel Hadas

Sweet smell of phlox drifting across the lawn—

an early warning of the end of summer.

August is fading fast, and by September

the little purple flowers will all be gone.

Season, project, and vacation done.

One more year in everybody’s life.

Add a notch to the old hunting knife

Time keeps testing with a horny thumb.

Over the summer months hung an unspoken

aura of urgency. In late July

galactic pulsings filled the midnight sky

like silent screaming, so that, strangely woken,

we looked at one another in the dark,

then at the milky magical debris

arcing across, dwarfing our meek mortality.

There were two ways to live: get on with work,

redeem the time, ignore the imminence

of cataclysm; or else take it slow,

be as tranquil as the neighbors’ cow

we love to tickle through the barbed wire fence

(she paces through her days in massive innocence,

or, seeing green pastures, we imagine so).

In fact, not being cows, we have no choice.

Summer or winter, country, city, we

are prisoners from the start and automatically,

hemmed in, harangued by the one clamorous voice.

Not light but language shocks us out of sleep

ideas of doom transformed to meteors

we translate back to portents of the wars

looming above the nervous watch we keep.

Source: Halfway Down the Hall: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1998)

Biography

The daughter of renowned classical scholar Moses Hadas, whose early death she has said gave her a “premature sense of the yoking of love and loss,” Rachel Hadas has published numerous collections of poetry, essays, and translations. Kevin Walzer, an editor at WordTech Communications who published Hadas’s The River of Forgetfulness (2006), comments that “her work—steeped in her knowledge of classical Greek and Latin, formally . . .

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