HARVEST MOON 2026
It is the Harvest Moon! On gilded vanes
And roofs of villages, on woodland crests
And their aerial neighborhoods of nests
Deserted, on the curtained window-panes
Of rooms where children sleep, on country lanes
And harvest-fields, its mystic splendor rests!
Gone are the birds that were our summer guests,
With the last sheaves return the laboring wains!
All things are symbols: the external shows
Of Nature have their image in the mind,
As flowers and fruits and falling of the leaves;
The song-birds leave us at the summer’s close,
Only the empty nests are left behind,
And pipings of the quail among the sheaves.
- Henry Wadsworth LongfellowA great golden moon rises over the sleeping countryside, gilding weather vanes and thatched rooftops, silvering the empty nests of departed songbirds, and spilling its pale radiance across fields shorn of their summer abundance. The last wagons creak homeward beneath the weight of the harvest, their wheels stirring the dust of country lanes. Behind curtained windows, dreams flutter while the wind whispers through the stubble of freshly reaped fields. Summer has surrendered its green splendor to the amber hush of autumn, and the earth settles into the bittersweet stillness of another season's passing.
