Poems for October 2025's Trending Searches
October is my favorite month. I feel much the same as L.M Montgomery, who wrote, "I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers." Trees are glowing, winds are howling, and chilly nights lull me to sleep in a cocoon of blankets. Bring your phone or laptop and a blanket cocoon quickly becomes a great place to search the internet. Here’s what web wanderers searched for this month.
AWS Outage
October 20th was memorable for two reasons: one was a major web service outage, and we’ll get to the other in a bit. Of course this topic trended—it seems nearly everyone on the planet was impacted. For better or worse, we expect the internet to always be there for us, 24/7.
Jenny Xie captures the vibe of modern humanity’s nonstop screen time in her poem “Square Cells.”
“My window faces stone and glass.
My screen faces my face.”
2. Comet Tonight
In late October, stargazers searched both the heavens and the web for two comets named Lemmon and SWAN. The duo were simultaneously slated to pass closer to Earth than ever before.
So, a poem about lemons, swans, or comets? It’s a wonderful array of options. I landed on a comet poem, thanks to my admiration for Arthur Sze, who recently became our 25th U.S. Poet Laureate. His poem “Comet Hyakutake” brims with beautiful imagery and big ideas.
3. The Perfect Neighbor
For me, the perfect neighbor is someone who lives a quarter mile up the road and texts to check in during power outages. For millions of Netflix viewers, though, The Perfect Neighbor is a documentary about a Florida woman who shot and killed her own neighbor.
Hieu Minh Nguyen recalls the tension and violence of cruel neighbors in his poem “When neighbor boys gathered.”
4. MTV
I’m just the right age to remember coming home from school, turning on MTV, and catching Sheryl Crow’s new music video. Or Peter Gabriel’s. Or Pearl Jam’s. I remember Total Request Live and MTV Unplugged. This month, MTV officially pulled the plug on whatever remained of its music programming, pivoting fully to reality TV.
Music and poetry are inextricably linked. Song lyrics are a form of poetry, as in the lyrics to “Video Killed the Radio Star” for example. Music often inspires poets, too, as in the entire genre of jazz poetry.
For the purposes of this story, I offer a seasonal poem about eerie organ music written by Robert Graves, who passed away the year I was born.
5. Diwali
And now we come to the second major event of October 20th: Diwali. I was reminded of the holiday by a coworker who recently emigrated from India. He described it as somewhat analogous to Halloween, because it’s a fall festival, and because Goan celebrations include demon effigies.
Kumud Biswas kindles the spirit of light triumphing over darkness in his poem “Diwali.”
As October fades, this monthly feature is ready to go the way of music on TV. It’s run its course. Thank you for reading. Keep searching the internet for answers. And whenever you get curious about something, try to find a poem about it.
Written by Allisonn Church
Allisonn Church was born in a small rural community to a mother who pinned butterflies in glass cases and hid scarab beetles in her jewelry box. Her first favorite poem was “The Willow Fairy”’ by Cicely Mary Barker. Find a list of Allisonn's published work at churchpoems.wordpress.com.
