September Light

While the thin September light washes across the hillside,
falling along the sides of the brightly colored houses
built in jagged rows beside the lanes
which wind up the hills away from town,
the last cruise ship sounds its horn,
sailing the last of the tourist horde back to America;
We are an Alaskan town again.
While the September light flows through the windows of the office buildings
onto the desks of working folk,
who say
“It must be Monday in Juneau, the rain stopped and the Sun is shining” when it is sunny and “Another day in Paradise” when the storms howl,
the lawyers and lobbyists move through other parts of the Great Land
sipping whiskey and murmuring tales of power,
puffed up and strutting across stages in village high school gyms,
Rotary luncheons and fund-raiser dinners,
promising the world and all its riches to their constituents only;
they have not come to our town yet…
In the pale wash of September’s last light
the vast herd of wandering tourists gone for the year
the pompous law-writers not yet descended, bickering:
We are an Alaskan town again.