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Enjoy the day off and we’ll see you tomorrow!
In the meantime….do you know why we celebrate this day?
In 1894, then-President Grover Cleveland created Labor Day as a federal holiday. “Labor Day pays tribute to the contributions and achievements of American workers […] (it’s traditionally observed on the first Monday in September). It was created by the labor movement in the late 19th century and became a federal holiday in 1894. Labor Day also symbolizes the end of summer for many Americans.”
from history.com
Here at the Writing Center, we’d like to recognize how hard SJSU students, faculty, and staff work every single day. We are happy to celebrate this holiday with you.
Keeping with our yearly tradition of sharing a Labor Day poem, this year’s selection–in light of campus opening for a fully in-person semester for the first time since 2020–is reflection on the passage of time and a reminder to take it slow, no matter how daunting things may seem.
The End of Summer
BY RACHEL HADAS
Sweet smell of phlox drifting across the lawn—
an early warning of the end of summer.
August is fading fast, and by September
the little purple flowers will all be gone.
Season, project, and vacation done.
One more year in everybody’s life.
Add a notch to the old hunting knife
Time keeps testing with a horny thumb.
Over the summer months hung an unspoken
aura of urgency. In late July
galactic pulsings filled the midnight sky
like silent screaming, so that, strangely woken,
we looked at one another in the dark,
then at the milky magical debris
arcing across, dwarfing our meek mortality.
There were two ways to live: get on with work,
redeem the time, ignore the imminence
of cataclysm; or else take it slow,
be as tranquil as the neighbors’ cow
we love to tickle through the barbed wire fence
(she paces through her days in massive innocence,
or, seeing green pastures, we imagine so).
In fact, not being cows, we have no choice.
Summer or winter, country, city, we
are prisoners from the start and automatically,
hemmed in, harangued by the one clamorous voice.
Not light but language shocks us out of sleep
ideas of doom transformed to meteors
we translate back to portents of the wars
looming above the nervous watch we keep.
Rachel Hadas, “The End of Summer” from Halfway Down the Hall: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 1998 by Rachel Hadas. Reprinted with the permission of Wesleyan University Press.
Source: Halfway Down the Hall: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1998). Retrieved from the Poetry Foundation.
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