Stanley Kunitz was born in Worcester, MA in 1905 and died in NYC in 2006. Over his 101 years he graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1926. He published 12 collections of poetry, several collected interviews and essays, and was the editor or translator for 5 books.
Kunitz is a winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, the National Medal of the Arts, the Bollingen Prize, the Robert Frost Medal, and Harvard's Centennial Medal.
Today I would like to share with you a poem by Stanley Kunitz called "The Snakes of September":
The Snakes of September
All summer I heard them
rustling in the shrubbery,
outracing me from tier
to tier in my garden,
a whisper among the viburnums,
a signal flashed from the hedgerow,
a shadow pulsing
in the barberry thicket.
Now that the nights are chill
and the annuals spent,
I should have thought them gone,
in a torpor of blood
slipped to the nether world
before the sickle frost.
Not so. In the deceptive balm
of noon, as if defiant of the curse
that spoiled another garden,
these two appear on show
through a narrow slit
in the dense green brocade
of a north-country spruce,
dangling head-down, entwined
in a brazen love-knot.
I put out my hand and stroke
the fine, dry grit of their skins.
After all,
we are partners in this land,
co-signers of a covenant.
At my touch the wild
braid of creation
trembles.
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