Holds Upon Happiness

It isn’t really autumn yet since it will be 82 degrees today. However, the leaves are just starting to change, and the nights are becoming cooler. Robert Frost seems to be an autumn poet for me and I have featured a poem of his most years. I am getting a bit ahead of myself because I miss autumn in New England but here is this year’s Robert Frost poem. All I want is to go apple picking and then bake all the things with the bags and bags of apples I bring home. My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a treeToward heaven still,And there's a barrel that I didn't fillBeside…

Denise Levertov was born in England in 1923. From the beginning, she had great confidence in her poetry even sending T. S. Eliot some of her poems. She was only twelve years old at the time. Eliot responded with a two-page typewritten letter offering advice and encouragement. Levertov moved to the United States after her marriage. Her verse is “frequently a tour through the familiar and the mundane until their unfamiliarity and otherworldliness strike us.” I have a small grain of hope—one small crystal that gleamsclear colors out of transparency.I need more.I break off a fragmentto send you.Please take this grain of a grain of hopeso that mine won't shrink.Please…

Autumn is my favorite time of year. It is as if I come alive when the days cool down and the leaves start to change. When I came across this poem about my favorite time of year, written by Mary Oliver, one of my favorite poets, it was the obvious choice for today’s post. Don't you imagine the leaves dream now how comfortable it will be to touchthe earth instead of the nothingness of the air and the endlessfreshets of wind? And don't you think the trees, especially those with mossy hollows, are beginning to look forthe birds that will come—six, a dozen—to sleep inside their bodies? And don't you…