Early October
When I was a child,
I raked thousands
of willow leaves into a pile
until the wind
blasted them
into the neighbor’s yard.
Before I could even fall back on them,
feel the crunch on my small shoulders,
my father would open the screen door
and yell: “Aren’t you done, yet?”
How could I be, when the wind
had blown me away
down the street, past the row houses,
St. Paul’s Church, Bethlehem High School,
the Price Chopper.
I flapped my wings
with the others
thick as clouds,
migrating with the glow
of streetlights.
With the TV blaring,
he must not have heard
our honking,
must not have seen
our giant V
in the sky.
_____________
Sherri Levine
Review by Suzy Harris
“Early October” begins with a typical scene of a child raking leaves into a pile and then takes an unexpected turn when the child is blown away with the leaves, blown up into the sky with the geese, escaping the father’s loud voice and blaring TV. This poem captures both the child’s reality and the child’s imagination using the child’s voice so effectively we want to be there with her, part of that “giant V/in the sky.”
Review by Massimo Fantuzzi
This poem reminds me that somewhere a freeing and redemptive sentiment runs through the veins of all living things, carrying the power to grow and elevate the small and the singular into a murmuration, a flood, pulsing and swooping across the sky. The mother of all evenings is approaching; the end of the day is here: it might be time to pull ourselves together, to multiply in the multitude we have always been part of, to find each other on the common ground and shared path. If we want to surViVe the night, that is.
Review by David A. Goodrum
The poem is a wonderfully portrayed story from a moment in childhood, when the power of the imagination can overcome gravity, physical form, even – or especially – our parents’ lack of awareness.
Review by Dave Mehler
I guess what I love about this poem is the concrete and specific housed within the context of whimsy and magic realism. I take the voice literally when she says she’s a little girl doing a chore partly out of duty to her parents and partly out of a desire to rake them into a pile to fall into them and in the process becomes the leaves being blown past the Price Chopper, and then in the process of that becomes the geese. The best fantasy, or I should say most effective is the kind housed firmly in place and the real that we might know like a willow tree, a nagging parent, St. Paul’s Church and Bethlehem High School. And by the end we are flying with Mary Oliver’s ‘Wild Geese’? I’m also impressed by the ability to have such a vivid memory of childhood to be able to write about it as an adult but retain a child like view, and one so concretely remembered about growing up ‘upstate’. The poem is imaginitive but would be so much lesser in my opinion without the Price Chopper! It’s a poem that’s bittersweet, but through imagination and literal memory lands firmly on joy. Masterful poem.