As August Comes / Clinton Scollard

Now August Comes

In dull monotony of heat
    The hazy hills and lowlands lie,
And billow till they blend and meet
    With lurid amplitudes of sky.

The locust's shrilly fife-note cleaves
    The fervid air, a knife of sound,
As August comes with poppy leaves
    Around his swarthy temples bound.

~~
Clinton Scollard (1860-1932)
from  Old and New World Lyrics, 1888 

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada, the United States, and the European Union]

Clinton Scollard biography

Charles J. Sharp, Garden locust (Acanthacris ruficornis). CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.

August's featured poem

The Penny Blog's featured poem for August 2025:

A Song to Mithras, by Rudyard Kipling

[...]

Mithras, God of the Noontide, the heather swims in the heat.

Our helmets scorch our foreheads, our sandals burn our feet.

[...]

(music by Griffin Distribution)

https://gdancesbetty.blogspot.com/2014/08/a-song-to-mithras.html

Penny's Top 20 / July 2025

    

Penny's Top 20

The most-visited poems on  The Penny Blog in July 2025:

  1.   Summer 1969, Michael G. Munoz

  2.  Large Red Man Reading, Wallace Stevens

  3.  Morning of My Life, Will Dockery

  4.  The Mounting Summer, Brilliant and Ominous, Delmore Schwartz

  5.  The Moon and Stars are Making Love, George J. Dance

  6.  Esthetique du Mal, Wallace Stevens

  7.  Even in the bluest noonday of July, Robert Louis Stevenson

  8.  July, William Morris

  9.  I am a Canadian, John Diefenbaker

10.  Gathered Roses, F.W. Bourdillon

11.   Summer Storm, Duncan Campbell Scott

12.  July, Folgore de San Geminiano

13.  A July Noon, Helen Gray Cone

14.  June, Folgore de San Geminiano

15.  The Bright Extensive Will, AE Reiff

16.  Ode to Sport, Pierre de Coubertin

17.  At Day-close in November, Thomas Hardy

18.  Chaos in Motion and Not in Motion, Wallace Stevens

19.  When Mary the Mother Kissed the Child, Charles G.D. Roberts

20. The Gravedigger, Bliss Carman

Source: Blogger, "Stats"