King Tides

by Taunja Thomson

Brighter & brighter, moon & pumpkin, season moves, sumptuous orbs like the pupil in the center of our irises widening to catch the scarcer light.  

Rub bare branch with fingertips, flick ruby leaves, remember June’s cherries, claret, hard, shiny, how the lemon leaves of now call to mind September’s golden delicious.

October has its own ambrosia, maple flames, burning bushes, bulrushes copper-bending. Wend your way through thinning thicket to grey road. See redtop’s amaranth gleam in sun, bottlebrush skeleton seedhead bob in rain, see how they grow in ditch & puddle, thrive in the muddle between nature & human, ransacked by caterpillar & mouse & fawn-winged sparrow.

Learn to love autumnal darkness like you love night’s receding in March, like king tides giving way to the distant moon.

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Taunja Thomson is co-author of Frame & Mount the Sky (2017), a chapbook of ekphrastic poetry, as well the author as Strum and Lull (2019) and The Profusion (2019). She is a lover of animals, art, trees, surrealism, black and white movies, walking in autumn rains, feeding wild birds in winter, playing in spring mud, & bat-watching in summer. Her first full-length collection of poems, Plunge, was published by Uncollected Press in 2023, & she is co-author of Delight Is a Field (2025), published by Shanti Arts.

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