Poetry is perplexing and prose is prosaic.
How, then, can I tell you about this feeling that comes upon me, year after year, when the leaves drift dreamily downwards to drape the earth in golden hues?
There is such awe in autumn. What can’t be explained can be felt in the veins.
It is the season of waning light, of dancing with death....yet what glory it reveals!
Perplexing as it is, autumn awakens the poet in us.
I.
Find me in the fading light.
Where gaudy ways have no sway,
and our mind’s eye opens bright.
II.
Now has descended to earth below,
what yellow luster once reigned on high,
that we may touch its transmuted glow.
III.
Shining ever brighter,
incandescent;
Standing ever stronger,
magnificent;
Fear not the waning sun
nor winter near.
'Tis a season
time transcendent.
IV.
No longer living, but glowing,
How the fallen leaves feign death!
So luminous in their knowing.
V.
Exuberance in the spring;
Exhilaration in the fall,
The body in bloom can enthrall;
the well-seasoned soul knows to sing.
VI.
Some are falling in love,
but I’m falling in fall.
How I do love thee, Fall!
Ascending high above,
to the end of it all.
VII.
If it were not for yellow,
what would we know of mellow?
And were it not for the fruit,
would not the flower be moot?
VIII.
I once thought I was like a tree...
alone in a yellow wood I'd be.
But now I wonder...
Am I not like a single leaf,
Detached and drifting,
to some ground of peace?
While all of life breathes on,
towards an end that is none.
IX.
Two rails converged in a yellow wood,
And I took the only one left to travel by.
But had two roads ever really diverged?
On times gone by I reflect with a sigh.
Pondering whether it made all the difference
to have gone that way, now that the end is nigh.
He (my alter) had not taken my path of preference.
Ages hence, in a yellow wood, we stand eye to eye.
X.
Bow thankfully at the dying of the light,
And enter gracefully into that good night.
The autumn leaf knows its common source.
It drifts softly to rejoin the One, serene.