I just remembered something I did in grade school that convinces me that we grown-up college students aren’t too different from our 11-year-old selves. When I was a sixth grader, I decided to hold a poetry contest for Valentine’s Day. Kids from the whole school submitted poems on little scraps of wide-ruled paper. These poems are from autumns spent at Whitman. I’d like to hear your fall poems too, please.

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Patter the rain
patinas leaf pretties
so firebird red of yesterday
like copper grown weary, fresh fall speckled brown
mud rust, on gold sidewalks rest footsteps brown spatter

**

a sudden jolt
and past me whisked a neon meteor of fate
cyclist’s gait
counterpoint click-clicking chainlink
a thunderbolt of lightning pace
by moment’s space
forward careening past my present

a dog to walk is just an excuse
for strolling round the streets at night
eyeing neighbors’ habitats and gliding past the windowlights

**

I think umbrellas are silly. for what’s the use,
really, in shying from stormcloud
when the world is wet?
why not succumb
as the soil has done~
powder relinquished to mud?