November Woods

Every November, beginning in 1979, this poem floats back into my mind, bringing with it a brief but poignant sharpness of long past grief and regret.  My husband and I were in Botswana for a three year term with Mennonite Central Committee, and my mother was newly widowed a few months before we left, back in Virginia. I left for Botswana confused and steeped in guilt, caught between a husband who wanted to go and a mother, alone, who desperately wished we would stay.

From a world away, I put together a scrapbook, of sorts, filled with poems and pictures I cut from South African magazines and mailed it to her in time for the first anniversary of my father's death. Even to me at the time, it seemed a pitiful offering, but it was the best I could do, so far removed from her day to day struggles.  This poem isn't a great one, not of literary excellence or note, but it does convey the essence of November and the memories I carried of the season, in a land where there was no time of year that remotely resembled autumn in the east.

November Woods

Lovely are the silent woods, on grey November days.

When the leaves fall red and gold, upon the quiet ways.

From massive beech, majestic oak and birches white and slim,

Like the pillared aisles of a cathedral, vast and dim.

Drifting mist, like smoking incense, hangs upon the air.

Along the paths where birds once sang, the trees stand stripped and bare.

Making Gothic arches with their branches interlaced,

And window-framing vistas, richly wrought and finely traced.

It is good to be in such a place, on such a day.

Problems vanish from the mind and sorrow steals away.

In the woods of grey November, silent and austere, 

Nature gives her benediction to the passing year.

                                                      Patience Strong