10.2.2026 – it is October

it is October
shall remember loans of the
sun to you in June

Silver leaves of the last of summer.
Poplar and elm silver leaves.

Leaves not least of all of the Lombardy poplar,
Standing before the autumn moon and the autumn wind
as a woman waits in a doorway for some one who
must be coming.

All you silver leaf people, you I have seen and heard
in a hundred summer winds,

It IS October, it is a week, two weeks, till the rain and frost
break on us and the leaves are washed off, washed
down

In January when the trees fork gray against a clear winter
blue in the spare sun silver of winter or the lengthened
frost silver of the long nights—

I shall remember then the loans of the sun to you in June,
I shall remember the hundred winds who kissed you

Poplar and Elm by Carl Sandburg as published in Good Morning America in The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg (Harcourt, Brace: New York, 1970).