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Readers can click to the next month at the conclusion of each poem. You can also go to each month by clicking on the link to the months here:
Jan/Feb/Mar/Apr/May/Jun/Jul/Aug/Sep/Oct/Nov/Dec/Intro
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August, 2026
“August”
by Daniel Warren Brown
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“Harvest Moon”/Sandra Wagner, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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August
(for Four August Jazz Babies)
August has few songs
no August Leaves
or August Can Really Hang You Up The Most
or It Might As Well Be August
though;
August is jazz essence
Its Harvest Moon
spills across the landscape
like a languorous
Lester Young ballad
on a warm cloudless night.
August is a mysterious traveler
that wanders its days
with thirty one questions
as mysterious as
a pair of Footprints
Wayne Shorter
discovered strung along
the shoreline,
when no one is near.
August cascades linking
swinging hard bop sunny days
and tumultuous modal winds
with hurricanes
at their thrashing peak
like a Jack DeJohnette
press roll
picking
up speed.
August reaches
across boundaries
as if Rahsaan Roland Kirk
was circular breathing,
blowing three horns at once,
a cadenza fusing
the humid
blue tradition
of july
with the unknown freedom
of September.
August has few songs
just the breath of babies
swinging and strong.
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Listen to Daniel Warren Brown read his poem
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Daniel Warren Brown has loved jazz (and music in general) ever since he delved into his parents’ 78 collection as a child. He is a retired special education teacher who began writing as a senior. He always appreciates being published in journals and anthologies. At age 72 he published his first collection Family Portraits in Verse and Other Illustrated Poems through Epigraph Books, Rhinebeck, NY. Daniel writes daily about music, art and whatever else catches his imagination.
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Listen to the 2016 recording of drummer Jack DeJohnette playing the Maurice White/Verdine White/Reginald Burke composition “Serpentine Fire,” with Ravi Coltrane (saxophone); and Matthew Garrison (bass). [Universal Music Group]
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Click here to read Terrance Underwood’s poem for September
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