This week’s writing prompt, brought by Christine Kendall, was: “Write a poem starting with the opening line of Helen Hunt Jackson’s ‘November’: This is the treacherous month when autumn days…” Ten minutes of writing produced the following unexpurgated works.

October

Greg Wright

This is the treacherous month when
autumn days betray my summer lusts
by draping them in raiment which falls
rich and red from bared shoulders
and clings wet to breast and hip,
when carnal knowledge of coming
frost raises flesh so sensitive to touch
and longing for spring arises with vigor.

A rest; and then return to the vernal,
a leap and surge of fertile potency.

Those are the months when summer’s flush
expose the treachery of autumnal death.

September Song, after Lines by Helen Hunt Jackson

Julianne Seeman

The month of my birth
‘is the treacherous month
When autumn days’
glorious in their last gasp
plunge of red and gold
purple and the lush
green of grass signal
the end.
It would be easy to ignore
unless we knew otherwise
and view the flames
of Aspen as torches lifted
to heaven and some kind
of organized eternity
perhaps for those who believe
in the golden light
of Ascension and Resurrection
all trumpets and glory
a veritable Easter Tide of Joy.
But this is autumn, Fall
with its own Biblical annunciation
declaring the end, the end,
the end.
And how is it that life
is most glorious at its end:
no wrinkles, illness
or infirmity; no loss
or poverty, just this ceremony
of leaves, A Bach Cantata
lifting our eyes, filling our souls,
immune for the moment
to the death that will follow.