Green Dragon Books: 6 of 30
Friday, Nov. 6, 2026
I work seven days a week. Like anyone who owns a small business, the concept of “days off” is a foreign one to me. I’m not complaining, I’m doing what I love! But seven days a week is all the days. I’ve considered hiring a part-time clerk to give me a few afternoons off. I’ve even interviewed a few folks. But then the sales slow down or there’s some sort of unexpected expense, and any money I’ve been able to build up vanishes.
If I did take time off, Friday afternoons would be first on the list. I just cannot seem to get anything done on Friday afternoon. I struggle even to read. I just want to stretch out in a field somewhere and take a deep, long nap. Wake up at dusk and watch the fireflies. Friday afternoons are for watching the shadows lengthen or leaves slowly float to the ground or a river ease its way through its banks.
There are books that feel like Friday afternoons. A Month in the Country, certainly. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe. Girl Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen. The Stranger. Eh, maybe not Camus. But you get the point. Any book that’s slightly strange, or more magical, somehow mesmerizing.
It is on such afternoons I write poetry.
I would never attempt to write a novel, I have too much respect for the craft. Poetry, though… I mean, I like Yeats and Keats and Eliot as much as the next guy. But some of what passes for poetry, let’s just say it’s not for me. Which is okay. Not everything has to be for me.
I do like writing poetry. It helps me process what’s going on around me, to distill emotions and moments in time into something I can hold onto. I sit in the window as I wait for a few customers to finish their rummaging in the Stacks and watch the goldenrod leaves fall from the beech tree out front, and I write in a journal I’m holding with a slightly leaky fountain pen:
Everywhere I looked, I saw death
Dead things falling from the sky
Floating as they fell, waving goodbye
A bit morbid, perhaps. Friday afternoons also remind me of death. They are an ending, of sorts.
I decide to think about something cheerier. If Friday afternoon is my favorite time of the week, the end of summer is my favorite time of the year. Summer ends around the middle of October in Macon. I close my eyes and picture the end of my summer. What it felt like and smelled like. I open my eyes and then I write:
I went for a walk in the woods, in Georgia, in the summer
I was met by a chorus of fireflies glittering in the deepening dusk
They hovered and hummed above the honeysuckle and ferns in
Humid air heavy with the sick sweet scent of magnolia blossoms
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A distant brooding thunder warned me of walking in the woods
But I ignored it, welcomed as I was by gleaming lanterns
“Turn back” whispered the cooling wind as it waved the trees
Deep in the shadows moved dark things that haunt dreams
Monsters of myth, mystical magical unknowable things
But I learned long ago not to fear that which wanders the woods
The rustling breeze sent a dusting of leaves swirling about
The rain began gently playing on the oaks and loblolly pines
Then heavy it splashed and crashed among stones and tree roots
I ran along the red clay path, carved by foot and paws and claws
Soaked and breathing heavy, cheered by the storm’s applause
There is a calm after rain falls in the woods and swelling streams
Mockingbirds preach counterfeit sermons of survival
Fireflies spark against darkened, twisting kudzu vines
Be prepared for such things, should you walk in the woods
In Georgia, in the summer, in the rain
Hmm… Well it’s not Yeats. But it’ll do.
