The four of seasons feels unhitched this year.
No crisp day or chill night for need of shawl.
October bathes in slow sun, forswears weary
winter. No bawling geese fly in vee-shaped crawl.
These warm days wear like a gold bracelet.
Demeter forestalls the close of shiftless summer,
and Persephone, goddess of grain, breath of harvest,
reined in festival green, forecasts autumn.
Gathering in, Mother and Daughter, forlorn,
await the fortune of unbridled spring
when seeds are cast for seedlings born,
foretell the yonder song of northbound wings.
So reigns the cycle of seasons, four in round,
harnessing wind, river, fire, ground.
-Jo Barbara Taylor
Jo Barbara Taylor lives near Raleigh, NC. Her poems, fiction and academic writing have appeared in journals, magazines and anthologies, more recently, North Carolina Literary Review and Broad River Review. She has published four chapbooks and a full-length collection, How to Come and Go (Chatter House Press). She leads a poetry writing “funshop” in Durham.