As if overnight, the fall foliage has vanished, swept into gray. The secret of Vermont’s autumn is the long lingering twilights, languorous and violet. Branch by branch, the trees are emerging from their summer splendor. Before frost yet, my garden rages on, orange tithonia, candy-colored cosmos, the morning glories that intrepidly vine through sunflowers and tomatoes and borage.
This weekend, I walked through Montpelier. So much of Vermont’s capital remains boarded up after the July flood, in need of money or labor. Other folks have shuttered up and headed elsewhere. It’s impossible to pretend that the world around us isn’t swirling in chaos. Nonetheless, when I come in with my fingers and toes cold, I build a fire. The neighbors string up gold lights. Quickly, quickly, and immensely slowly, the season settles in.
“You must try,
— Jane Hirshfield
the voice said, to become colder.
I understood at once.
It’s like the bodies of gods: cast in bronze,
braced in stone. Only something heartless
could bear the full weight.”
Stony Soil Vermont 
Wow a lot of it is still boarded up. That certainly was a powerful flood. I hope everything will eventually get back normal.
I hope so too. These disasters are devastating.
So many of them, too.
Who knows….. the city will certainly change.
The Jane Hirshfield poem reminded me of a poem I wrote in objection to a God who has no compassion for the victims of disasters, even children and babies:
Helion
cold as stone,
cold to the bone,
so cold inside even icebergs moan,
such is ur Gaud on hiss icy throne.
—michael r. burch
Quite the poem.
I have been a heretic since reading the Bible from cover to cover at age 11, at the urging of my devout Christian parents. In fact, my first poem, written around age 11 to 13, was heretical:
Bible Libel
by Michael R. Burch
If God
is good
half the Bible
is libel.
All my sympathies were with the children and their mothers as they wandered in the desert without food to eat or water to drink.
I hope Montpelier will get back up on its feet before too long.
Me, too!