Milkweed Wishes and September Reveries

September 17, 2019

On this golden September afternoon, when the fields hum with the last whispers of summer and the air trembles with drifting seed, two writers — each centuries apart in style and sentiment — capture the same soft ache of autumn: farewell mingled with possibility.

Their words, like milkweed fluff itself, drift through the air, carrying nostalgia, magic, and the invitation to dream.

“The milkweed pods are breaking,
And the bits of silken down
Float off upon the autumn breeze
Across the meadows brown.

I wish three times, and watch them go
Far as my eyes can see.
Some day a faery wind will blow
My wishes back to me!”
– Cecil Cavendish, The Milkweed

There is an old superstition — one every gardener secretly honors — that wishes made upon milkweed fluff come true.

Cavendish’s delicate verse is not merely a children’s rhyme; it is a gardener’s vow of faith in renewal.

For even as the pods burst and scatter, they give birth to next year’s promise.

Every seed is a dream wrapped in silk, waiting for a soft landing.

“September: it was the most beautiful of words, he’d always felt, evoking orange-flowers, swallows, and regret.”
– Alexander Theroux, 1981

And there lies the truth of autumn: beauty bound to melancholy. The milkweed’s transformation — from bloom to seed to flight — mirrors our own quiet surrender to time’s turning wheel.

Theroux’s reflection would have pleased Cavendish, for even regret, when seen through the garden gate, has its own tender bloom.

So as the last butterflies vanish and the pods open their silken hearts, may we all make our three wishes and send them skyward — trusting the faery wind to return them when we need them most.