This Change: The Seasons Bring Change, Right?

Here in the northern hemisphere, this weekend was the official start of autumn. The change of seasons is almost palpable in the air. Our family spent an afternoon at a local park trail that runs through a beaver swamp, and the sense of change is strong: the flowers are finished blooming and only a few straggling blossoms remain, and the herons stand in the water hunting with an intense focus.

To be fair, a heron probably always has a certain intensity to its hunting style, but its obsessive focus seems more noticeable to me now. Getting ready for winter has moved up the local wildlife’s to-do list.

But it is Spring in Brazil

If you’ve been following along with these posts, you probably realized I have been in Brazil the last couple weeks. In the southern hemisphere, the seasons are flipped from what we are used to here. So spring has come to Brazil now.

I’m always interested by those places that don’t seem to follow what we have become used to as “normal” wherever we happen to live. For example, places that don’t have four distinct seasons, or if they have four seasons, they don’t have the extremes I’m used to.

I think about Las Vegas, how it rises out of the desert as some sort of technological miracle, year round bright against the desert’s more subtle seasonality. You can drive through much of Nevada and see the harsh, unforgiving nature of the climate. Then all of a sudden you get to Vegas and it is as if a beacon rose twenty stories out of nothing to become this amazing light-filled wonder.

Well, the same happens in many places, desert or not.

I was in a similarly extreme environment in Brazil last week. In the same way that Las Vegas startles, I was startled to see this whole ecosystem seem to appear out of nowhere. There was brush and dirt road and heat, and then, suddenly, farm, bordered by the harsh and unforgiving.

So this week’s poem is not an autumn poem, but it is a poem about seasons. About changes, sometimes more subtle than we might expect, or maybe a hard-edged transition from one space to the next.

This Change

Here the open arms of brush and scrub.
Here, the brick-red dirt road scraped
from the body of the field. Here cattle
whose owner sleeps in another zone.
Here soya and plantations and pivots
and to untrained eyes, daily,
the unrelieved relentless sun.
Wind’s a pathetic reminder that
a hundred thousand rutted miles of dream-chasing
caught only heat waves and fragments,
keys always perched just out of reach.

Here corn listens, tassels whisper,
soya down the road repeats:
what passes for a season is nearly ended,
what passes for the next season begins.

If you enjoyed This Change

You’ll find more of my poems on this blog or in the collection Stars Crawl Out From Their Caves, which is available in both ebook and print.  Missed a poem of the week? Links to prior weeks are on this page.

I feel blessed to have had the chance to visit Brazil, learn more about the world, see things which otherwise I could never have imagined. The world is such an amazing place. Nature and people and possibilities abound!

As always, comments are welcome. Have a great week!