All Hallows

This poem appears in the Fall 2019 issue of Modern Age. To subscribe now, go here.

When the first flicker of year-fall catches
Running up in the trees, burning
The dead year down, the bright leaves turning, turning
Like flames in every once-green-gold clearing,

When the new-prickling wind now fetches
Cardboard creeps and white ghost-faces
From attics, basement boxes, all the dusty web-strung spaces,
And the world’s shadow-time is quickly nearing,

Then rush out, child, into the dark-done street,
The lightless fields, the black expanses,
To join the night parade, the dormer drifts, the dances
Of all the shifting shapes that once were men.

Set out! O let your youthful night-blood beat
With all the creeps and crooks, the haunts and haints,
Till nothing but the prayers of all the dawn-bright saints
Can sing your raging heart to rest again.

Founded in 1957 by the great Russell Kirk, Modern Age is the forum for stimulating debate and discussion of the most important ideas of concern to conservatives of all stripes. It plays a vital role in these contentious, confusing times by applying timeless principles to the specific conditions and crises of our age—to what Kirk, in the inaugural issue, called “the great moral and social and political and economic and literary questions of the hour.”