Indian Summer

This poem channels the brief, luminous grace of the season it names. Campbell paints Canadian autumn in its full, aching beauty: the last warm winds, the smoke curling from farmhouse chimneys, the forest poised between splendor and surrender. There is no false cheer here. Instead, the poem holds the strange sadness of that last burst of color before the long white silence descends. It captures what every Canadian knows in their bones, that Indian Summer is not a gift but a warning, a beautiful pause before the world forgets green. This is poetry that makes you hear the wind through bare branches and taste frost on the air.