from Year of Irreversible Loss
November
LET: v. transitive, to permit, allow, suffer
Let November come in without knocking. For the year is a turning stile.
Let daybreak balance on chimneys. Morning’s a circus, sun a star acrobat.
Let branches discount their leaf-losses, and compensate with buds. The stripped tree is the true tree. Let me learn its lineaments.
Let the pods hang poker-stiff, straight down from the catalpa bough. For they rule the inches of air. Winds can draw clean lines along them.
Cold is a consummate dyer. Let samaras bleach in the ailanthus cluster. Let them recall how once they blazed. Especially as winter overtakes me, let me draw the fires of your remembered presence about me. As memory wanes in the cold, I stoke all my urgency of reminiscence: summoning back what I need, reconstructing it.
Norma Farber was an accomplished singer, poet, and author of children’s books who was born in Boston in 1909. She published six books of poetry for adults and eighteen books for children, with many children’s books published posthumously. She began publishing her poetry in local newspapers and magazines, such as the Boston Globe, in the 1950s. Her first book of poetry for adults, The Hatch, was published by Scribner in 1955. She wrote in a variety of formats, including lyric poetry and sonnets, earning critical praise for her writing’s energy, originality, and bold use of alliteration. Her poetry earned her the Golden Rose Award from the New England Poetry Club in 1958, and numerous awards from the Poetry Society of America.
She earned a Bachelor’s degree from Wellesley College in 1931 and a Master’s from Radcliffe College in 1932. She married Dr. Sidney Farber, founder of what became the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, in 1928. After her death, the Norma Farber First Book Award, awarded annually by the Poetry Society of America, was established to recognize a first book of poetry published by an American poet. “November,” the poem published with permission here, is from Year of Reversible Loss (El León Literary Arts/Andrea Young Arts, 2012).