. . . florid and bright and magnificent . . .

Election Day in Virginia and New Jersey! If you live in either place, get off your duffs and go vote!

I have to teach tonight, and I am pretty excited about it. We are starting our unit on Citizenship and Laws. It’s always awesome to discuss how our government is set up and what Election Day means . . . and how it relates to how things are done in people’s home countries. It always makes for such interesting, thoughtful discussions . . . a lot of times more thoughtful than many of my native speaker friends can muster . . .

I only have a thousand words done so far for NaNoWriMo. I hope to do some more this week. I am not daunted . . . yet. I have the ideas in my head. I just have to type them . . . I am just going to write what I am thinking, things that have happened, and then worry about making them fiction later. Otherwise, I won’t write a word. I am excited! One thousand words are more than 340, so that is a good start . . .

Problem is that I most want to write during the day while at work, since that’s when I feel most inspired, and that’s not good . . . I need to feel the same urge to procrastinate at home, I guess . . .

Today’s poem is from Poetry Daily . . . and fits in with the autumn theme. Hope everyone is doing well . . .

Autumn Passage
By Elizabeth Alexander


On suffering, which is real.
On the mouth that never closes,
the air that dries the mouth.

On the miraculous dying body,
its greens and purples.
On the beauty of hair itself.

On the dazzling toddler:
"Like eggplant," he says,
when you say "Vegetable,"

"Chrysanthemum" to "Flower."
On his grandmother's suffering, larger
than vanished skyscrapers,

September zucchini,
other things too big. For her glory
that goes along with it,

glory of grown children's vigil,
communal fealty, glory
of the body that operates

even as it falls apart, the body
that can no longer even make fever
but nonetheless burns

florid and bright and magnificent
as it dims, as it shrinks,
as it turns to something else.