Summer’s End

summer’s first light skims
top most limbs of hemlock
incites swallows to their aerobic
labors and peeks under the skirts
of my uphill big leaf maple

angular beams mottle through
elder and salmon berries painting
lime     grass     nile     bottle
greens     highlight slug slime
calligraphy on my window glass

agonizingly slow action painters
those banana slugs     viscous
Jackson Pollocks     trailing glutinous
stories of creation     disintegration
and forest floor

sword ferns fronds moving
in the breeze moiré against each other
cast tiger shadows in my bath
stretch spider silk to telegraph
emergency dots and dashes

signal alder leaves to fall
elderberries to redden
insinuate summer’s end

Linda Beeman is an award-winning non-fiction writer and poet living on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound. An independent scholar and former Foreign Service spouse, she writes extensively about South and Southeast Asian antique textiles. Her travel and cultural outreach articles have been published in The Los Angeles Times and the Foreign Service Journal, among others. Her poems have appeared in Pinyon, Windfall and online at Adanna.