Goodbye July and hello August. August is a month with a character all of its own. It’s still summer, but the stores are packed with fresh notebooks (there’s nothing more irresistible to me than a brand-new notebook, its pages empty and full of promise), pens and boxes of crayons with upright posture. School hasn’t started, but it’s right around the corner.
Sometimes in August, at night, you can feel the early tendrils of fall, tugging us toward more serious mindsets and away from lazy summer thoughts. But August is summer, real summer. Sometimes it makes you swelter and just laughs. Sometimes, like today, the weather is perfect and you think about the coming cold.
August can be angry, with roaring, rolling thunderstorms, the rain driving as though from a faucet, the lightning awakening the entire sky. A strange, hot wind might blow under swirling gray clouds, and you remember that this planet’s will is so much bigger than our own.
It often gets overlooked, with eyes ahead on what’s to come as schedules tighten in September, but it’s not a month to rush past, it’s not a holding place on the way to something else. Ignore that school supply aisle. It’s not autumn yet.
Need something to read? Check out Her Cousin Much Removed, The Great Paradox and the Innies and Outies of Time Management
Sign up for my spamless newsletter. And download Better Living Through GRAVY and Other Oddities, it’s free!
A Bit to Read 
August for the people and their favourite islands.
Daily the steamers sidle up to meet
The effusive welcome of the pier, and soon
The luxuriant life of the steep stone valleys
The sallow oval faces of the city
Begot in passion or good-natured habit
Are caught by waiting coaches, or laid bare
Beside the undiscriminating sea.
LikeLike
Absolutely beautiful, evocative language. The meter is total perfection.
I actually had to look it up, I wasn’t familiar with it.
LikeLike
You would not believe the number of times I tried to post that. Danged WordPress.
LikeLike
It still made me approve it, even though you’d previously commented. Do spammers spam poetry?
LikeLike
And, of course, the one that got through lacked the attrib. to Auden! And I wouldn’t mind being spammed by poetry ….
LikeLike
As long as it was good poetry, and not that stuff that sounds like a toddler learning to walk.
LikeLike
Ah, you mean
Assembling a collection of random prose
And then not
Lining it up at the right hand edge
Add cod philosophy to taste
Stir in some shallow sentiment
And serve in a slim volume.
LikeLike
Nope. Because that’s actually pretty good, and I like free form poetry. I mean:
Hmm. I can’t do it. I physically cannot butcher the meter in the appropriate way. OK, let me try it again:
If you want something to rhyme
When you are writing a poem
Don’t try to squish all the words in in time
Or drag syllables out for the tone.
You can actually see the baby falling.
LikeLike
Aha, yes, that. Bleagh. Of course there is one golden exception to this stricture, and his name is Ogden Nash.
LikeLike
Ah yes, but he did it on purpose and it’s funny. Many people do not do it on purpose and it’s funny, but also not on purpose.
LikeLiked by 1 person