October 2025 - Cardinal Flower

Oh, October! As this month’s poet, Susan Edwards Richmond, writes, “There are colors brighter than should ever/ be allowed in this world…” Although she is referring to hues of summer in her poem, Richmond’s lines apply just as aptly to you, October. You there with your otherworldly vermilion, cerise, and canary colored leaves brazenly winking and waving at your cloudless azure sky; you, October, are the month which reminds us that even as we despair for a world on fire, nature’s beauty still burns with an unbridled brilliance to comfort, inspire, and stir us all.

Cardinal Flower

by Susan Edwards Richmond

There are colors brighter than should ever

be allowed in this world. A bluebird’s

back breaking off a piece of perfect sky.

The gray tree frog’s brilliant youth. The moment

when you first know that radiant glow

against the green must be a tanager.

Every time I come upon this scarlet

bloom in forest wetland, in my canoe,

stroke after stroke, or when it stands erect

before me beside this trickle of brook,

cardinal flower just seems such a wrong

appellation for that intensity

I feel inside my skin, as much like sin

as it is like any absolution.

Susan Edwards Richmond is the founding editor of this Poem of the Month column. An award-winning poet with five collections of nature-based poetry, she also is the author of community science adventures for children. Her picture book Night Owl Night is a Massachusetts Book Award Honor Title and a Bank Street College of Education Best Children’s Book of the Year. Bird Count won the International Literacy Association’s Primary Fiction Award and is a Mathical Honor Book. To learn more about Susan’s work, visit https://www.susanedwardsrichmond.com/