Dry Spell

***

I have had almost one month where I have not felt like writing anything. I was busy at work for a time with our summer program for incoming college freshmen, but truth be told, I just have had nothing to say. It has been a long hot summer and a summer that began with pain and loss. Along about this time in August, I begin to long for the cooler days of fall. The bugs, especially the tiny white almost transparent linnets that fly in through the window screens at night seeking light, are a bit overwhelming. The heat and humidity for a good part of July felt deadly.


While pining for cooler days, however, I cannot forget that fall brings incredibly busy days at work! Longing for a simpler life is a fanciful, though fruitless, pastime. Here's a poem about summer and about the simple life (which exists, if at all, in the inner person as opposed to the outer world):

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

by William Butler Yeats

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight's all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear the water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,

I hear it in the deep heart's core.