Grace Paley's autumn poetry

Last year, I went on a Grace Paley kick after listening to “Friends” on the New Yorker Fiction Podcast.

There’s much I admire about Paley’s work: the sense of humor, the compassionate but unsentimental portrayal of the domestic sphere, the broader ethos behind her writing and political activism both. She told the Paris Review that it was the hours spent chasing her children at the playground that made her into both a writer and an activist:

I had my kids when I was about twenty-six, twenty-seven. I took them to the park in the afternoons. Thank God I was lazy enough to spend all that time in Washington Square Park. I say lazy but of course it was kind of exhausting running after two babies. Still, looking back I see the pleasure of it. That’s when I began to know women very well—as co-workers, really. I had a part-time job as a typist up at Columbia. In fact, when I began to write stories, I typed some up there, and some in the PTA office of P.S. 41 on Eleventh Street. If I hadn’t spent that time in the playground, I wouldn’t have written a lot of those stories. That’s pretty much how I lived. And then we had our normal family life—struggles and hard times. That takes up a lot of time, hard times. Uses up whole days.

With this admiration in mind, I’m sharing a few of Paley’s poems below. Both feel particularly apt this mid-September.

September

Then the flowers became very wild
because it was early September
and they had nothing to lose
they tossed their colors every
which way over the garden wall
splattering the lawn shoving their
wild orange red rain-disheveled faces
into my window without shame

Autumn

1

What is sometimes called a   

   tongue of flame

or an arm extended burning   

   is only the long

red and orange branch of   

   a green maple

in early September   reaching

   into the greenest field

out of the green woods   at the

   edge of which the birch trees   

appear a little tattered   tired

   of sustaining delicacy

all through the hot summer   re-

   minding everyone (in   

our family) of a Russian

   song   a story

by Chekhov   or my father

2

What is sometimes called a   

   tongue of flame

or an arm extended   burning

   is only the long

red and orange branch of

   a green maple

in early September   reaching   

   into the greenest field

out of the green woods   at the   

   edge of which the birch trees

appear a little tattered   tired

   of sustaining delicacy

all through the hot summer   re-

   minding everyone (in   

our family) of a Russian

   song   a story by

Chekhov or my father on

   his own lawn   standing   

beside his own wood in

   the United States of   

America   saying (in Russian)

   this birch is a lovely

tree   but among the others

   somehow superficial