Labor Day Lament: A Poem
This “last Friday” of summer has a feel of Fall about it: we’ll head to the first high school football game tonight with sweatshirts to guard against evening chill. As I’m watching the kids on our street squeeze out the last dregs of summer, I’m reminded of how I approached Labor Day weekend as a child–which then reminded me of a poem I wrote several years ago. It’s probably not worth the light of day, but it might capture how some of us feel about the twilight of summer:
Labor Day Lament
When did Labor Day lose
its apocalyptic tenor?
its doomsday connotation?
its autumnal terror?
For a boy of twelve
Labor Day comes like a thief in the night,
with the sound of a dreaded trump
announcing the end of
catching crayfish and walnut fights—
as if the first day of school
was a recurring Armageddon.
For a boy of sixteen
Labor Day is the Day of Judgment,
the parousia that quashes
a summer of paramours—
when teasing bikinis and spaghetti straps
become draped in the wool of
Catholic school uniforms whose
scratchy discomfort enacts
a tartan penance.
For the young man at twenty-seven
Labor Day is lost in the blur
of cubicled time,
barely a blip in the whir of ambition
and the tribulation of his toil.
But at twilight
in the yard—
in the cemetery of his play—
in the gloaming of summer,
the smell of that adolescent dread
briefly hangs on the unkempt lawn
like neglected manna,
a tenuous revenant lurking
between tricycle and sandbox.
Its haunting no longer spooks
his responsible adult disenchanted soul.
Tuesday will be no Second Coming.
Apocalyptic is kids’ stuff.
We’re too busy slouching toward success.
We’re too busy slouching toward success.
