Point of View

“September Tomatoes” is told from the perspective of a first-person speaker, a ruminative gardener who struggles emotionally to embrace change. As summer transitions to autumn, the speaker reluctantly uproots her dying tomato plants, which she has grown attached to after months of care. She waxes nostalgic for the joy that summer brought her, indicating that she “isn’t ready / to let go of summer so easily” (7-8). Despite the grief she feels, the speaker’s actions indicate her motivation to continue tending to her garden and by extension, to her life. She cleans out dying plants and composts them to make the necessary conditions for new growth.

In the final stanza, the speaker evokes the way her great-grandmother sang with other girls in her village as they uprooted flax. The songs were “so old / and so tied to the season that the very sound / seemed...