Labor Day Lament: A Poem

This "last Friday" of summer has a feel of Fall about it: we'll head to the first high school football game tonight with sweatshirts to guard against evening chill.  As I'm watching the kids on our street squeeze out the last dregs of summer, I'm reminded of how I approached Labor Day weekend as a child--which then reminded me of a poem I wrote several years ago.  It's probably not worth the light of day, but it might capture how some of us feel about the twilight of summer:

Labor Day Lament

When did Labor Day lose

its apocalyptic tenor? 

its doomsday connotation? 

its autumnal terror?

For a boy of twelve

Labor Day comes like a thief in the night,

with the sound of a dreaded trump

announcing the end of

catching crayfish and walnut fights—

as if the first day of school

was a recurring Armageddon.

For a boy of sixteen

Labor Day is the Day of Judgment,

the parousia that quashes

a summer of paramours—

when teasing bikinis and spaghetti straps

become draped in the wool of

Catholic school uniforms whose

scratchy discomfort enacts

a tartan penance.

For the young man at twenty-seven

Labor Day is lost in the blur

of cubicled time,

barely a blip in the whir of ambition

and the tribulation of his toil.

But at twilight

in the yard—

in the cemetery of his play—

in the gloaming of summer,

the smell of that adolescent dread

briefly hangs on the unkempt lawn

like neglected manna,

a tenuous revenant lurking

between tricycle and sandbox.

Its haunting no longer spooks

his responsible adult disenchanted soul.

Tuesday will be no Second Coming.

Apocalyptic is kids’ stuff.
We’re too busy slouching toward success.