Feeling October

October days are feeling softer,
the day beginning with scarves of mist and dewdrops,
   the sky now grey and filled with raindrops
           and the leaves
       like chameleons
changing from green to yellow to orange to red.
A fleet of tractors rumbles up the muddy road
      rattling the windows.
           First wood smoke
drifts skyward with the chattering crows.

Kim M. Russell, 7th October 2025

Dora is back to host this week’s Poetics at the dVerse Poets Pub, and we are tripping the October light fantastic. She enthuses about the “quality of October itself, its light, its promise, its magic”, which is what she would like us to reflect on, and has given us examples of poems about October by Sylvia Plath, John Greenleaf Whittier, W.B. Yeats and Dylan Thomas (among others) to inspire our poems, for which we have choices.  

We can: serve up a pumpkin as the main dish (literally or metaphorically) or as a side, using the third stanza of John Greenleaf Whittier’s ‘The Pumpkin’ as inspiration; adopt a persona and write in the first person voice of a regional folklore character (e.g., Baba Yaga or Ichabod Crane) or fairy tale character (Rumpelstiltskin or Cinderella ), for which she has given the example of Yeats’ ‘The Stolen Child’; or help our readers to see, smell, hear and feel October in our poetic lines, grilled over the fire of memory and imagination, with inspiration from two stanzas from ‘Poem in October’ by Dylan Thomas.

I love the Dylan Thomas poem so much (I am a fan, after all) that I decided to adopt the layout of his poem and write about October through the senses.

34 thoughts on “Feeling October”

  3. You had me with the first line, Kim, eager to understand how softness translated itself into the sights and sounds of October which you relayed with consummate perfection. Every phrase sings with a Dylan-esque quality. He’s one of my favorites too. And leaving us with the wood smoke drifting skyward was the crowning touch of this ultra-sensory poem.

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