Fall Arrives
Comes a day when we accept
the imperfection of our lives
and begin to hope
for a perfect death.
Goodbye, my illusions.
Anger of my hunger.
Seat-mates on trains, whose names
we never asked, carry away our secrets
and at the end of summer
comes that change in the light,
when the melancholy that underlies things
suddenly overlays them
like a quilt turned wrong side up,
the plain side with the stitching
there to stare us in the face,
there to be reckoned with.
What is this reckoning?
The flipped quilt of the world.
Then fall arrives, with glitter, with bustle,
like an auntie with a gold tooth.
ROBYN SARAH
– the TLS