John Keats called autumn the season of "mellow fruitfulness," suggesting that writing might ripen along with the earth's bounty.

My poem on this page "Tells Me" is seasonal, triggered by sensing-thinking the flavor of a late blueberry. As an older writer, fall season makes me aware of the crux of time - time brings things to fruition as it brings them to decline. It is a lovely paradox, and time is an element of many, many poems of celebration, elegy, love, and memory.

So far, I have mentioned no special tools for writing poetry, though anyone knows poetry is a language art or act. The poet needs to be at another crux, that of adequate language and adequate knowledge. That knowledge is of the material the poet is interested in and familiar with; that language can be as simple as pie or as ornate as a wedding cake!

The flavor of one blueberry suggested to me that cross between sweet and acid I experience in life. I was very happy in the closing lines to jump forward farther than the stanza break indicates - metallic, mountains, I found a weight in this small burst sphere that might be considered galactic! What a leap into space!

So consider what you know about, consider what language you might use to tell about it, and, since writing exists for the reader in time sequence, consider a leap or jump, a gap, which according to Robert Bly produces "dragon smoke," the contrail left by the creative leap!

Since I am warming to these comments, let me enter another fairly short seasonal poem. What do I know here? A few notes about nature. What else? Something about people coming to an understanding, a good one, in one of our culture's most literary settings - a garden!

GARDEN AGAIN

A bumper crop of cucumbers
One late raspberry

A flight of geese, noisy
heading north even on September First

Find in any one the sign
or icon of a conversation

between two people in a garden
when the few chores have been done

when they stand and speak
about their knowledge of good


For me, the hardest part of writing poetry is finding such moments of tasting or understanding; they involve my whole being, allowing for the insight and the wording and the exciting jump I want to see in poems.

I look forward to seeing your poem here on Amozon-ish!