November—fall’s end and winter’s entry.  And some years, election month.  It’s been particularly hard recently to remember that we are not the Blue-and-Red States of America, but the UNITED States of America.

Seasons

The hills are green again,

After summer’s dry brown brittleness.

Rain soaks deep to the roots

Of dormant shrubs and grasses.

Roots swell, the grass sprouts green,

Sap flows upwards in trees, 

Pushing out tender new leaves on koa and keawe.

Winter in Hawaii.

In the Washington Cascades,

Green leaves turned yellow, then brown.

And fell away

From dark skeletal branches 

Bristling upward against a low gray sky.

The somber winter tones

Await their covering of white snow.

Only the warm touch of distant spring 

Will waken their color.

The same month– 

Yet in one place life quickens, 

While in the other it slows.

If a season can have several meanings

Can’t it be so with other things?

Sand Crabs

I’ve never seen a live one there.

Just holes they dig along the watermark.

Big holes with high heaps of sand piled seaward,

And small ones with sand out spread fan-shaped and low.

Do small hole-diggers ever get to pile up heaps?

And did the big ones ever spread their sand?

Why the different styles of digging?

It’s the same beach.