Autumns Warning
Like a child clinging to its mother‘s leg,
summer clings graciously to leaves.
Resisting an inevitable conclusion.
The leaves dance with color, knowing all the while,
such beauty marks the death of them.
The tree’s flowing, green, shimmering and tattered dress,
cascades piece by piece to ground and grave.
She stands naked, stripped of a passing dignity.
Waiting instead, the cold, sterile, white of winter cloth.
The air exhales a morning chill.
It’s icy breath languishing upon morning’s virgin grass.
Approaching winter sends warning of its coming,
painting the ground in crystal colored, frozen mist.
Nature will carry her pregnancy to spring
and suckle her infant in summer’s warm green grass.
The children of summer will vanish in departing leaves
as the barren womb prepares another term.
Another long, winter’s pregnancy. Seeded in anticipation
of another birth, another distant joy.
Seeded with a coming spring, with the green leaves of a coming summer.
I resist tomorrow and the sterile business of winter.
I cling like stubborn leaves in want of summer’s warmth.
In want of one more summer’s day.
Autumn’s stay is so short lived. It clings to dying summer.
Like beauty begging one more day from youth.
The season will bed the naked tree and seed the earth again,
keeping the hope of Spring, deep in incubated warmth.
Deep in the snow covered womb of winter.
Nature is unimpressed with what I want.
It is her way to give birth; to bury her children in my memory.
I will gather the flowers of autumn and press them between the pages of my days.
Someone must mark the graves.
