Category: Autumn 2024

You can tell me the how of it all that you want,
explaining the way the light rays bend
around the curvature of the earth,
and how their travel through the atmosphere
produces all these colors. It doesn’t change things
or answer the why. There didn’t have to be beauty.
But here it is, glowing, and touching our souls.
I say it is a gift, a love note from the Yes,
just because.

This. To walk in this gold feels a privilege.
To hear the crunch of the brush
beneath my boots and the whispering
of the breeze through the dry dancing leaves,
to watch the hawk soar and heaped clouds
sail the endless blue, and crimson leaves
twirling down from the trees as if their fall
were part of some grand ballet.
This. Every miraculous detail. Such a gift.
Such a priceless gift.

One of the things that the Great Yes wanted to experience
was being a maple tree whose leave would turn red in fall.
And so it did.
And on one perfect October afternoon
when the air was cool and the sun warm
and shining through its red leaves,
the maple danced, and the Great Yes sang
from within its very atoms in absolute joy.

A host of lore abounds
telling how your coat,
dear woolly bear, predicts
what winter will hold.
The greater the brown,
the milder the season;
an abundance of black
means plenty of snow.
Here’s what I know:
You’re a sure sign
that winter is next,
and if I was smart,
I’d be digging out
woollies of my own.

No matter what life wrote on your pages today,
there was this, this maple glowing on the corner
of a street somewhere. It was part of today, too,
even if you didn’t see it with your own eyes
or give it a thought. It was here, radiating its glow,
causing a certain light to rise into the air, lifting
its song to a brighter scale. It helped
hold us up. All of us. And it didn’t even care
if any of us knew.

The mornings are filled with fog now
as if the earth were filling her bowls
with some luminescent porridge
to help the sun ward off the autumn chill.
It softens our wakings, letting us linger
in the world of wispy dreams a while
before the illusions of the day solidify
around us, pulling us once more
into the stories of our lives.
The orange of the remaining maple leaves
gleams in the filtered light, a bright
reminder to write into our stories
some scenes of lustiness and joy.

A handful of weeks ago, the fields were newly plowed.
Along their edges, trees in fresh green watched
seeds and prayers fall into the turned soil.
Beneath the circle dance of sun and stars,
sprouts rose in neat rows and put forth leaves
that marked their kind, beans in this field,
corn in that, each growing taller day by day.
And the trees, whose leaves turned emerald,
watched and whispered their praise
as the crops reached their fullness, and drying,
turned gold, and were gathered from their fields.
Now the trees turn golden too, and crimson,
and release their leaves to dance across
the empty fields, singing to them, “Well done.”

This air, these cycling seasons,
this rocky island on which we stand,
these trees, every blade of grass, every drop of rain,
this brilliant sunshine, this tumultuous variety
of shape and color and form, was given to us all.
Not to an elite, however defined. Not conditioned
by anyone’s notion of worthiness. But freely,
to teach and bring comfort and joy.

It looks like a scene from another world,
and I suppose it is. Or a portrait perhaps
of another time, long ago.
And that, I suppose, depends
on how you measure time and whether
you even believe in it at all anymore,
what with things passing by at such a
breakneck speed these days. Nevertheless,
at early twilight on a day I call yesterday
I turned down the road just in time
to see a line of turkey hens,
or so I guessed them to be, blending
in with the early evening shadows
as they moseyed across the road,
and disappeared into the brush.

Stand beneath the heavens,
beneath the vast canopy
spread above you to remind you
that, although you are not supreme,
you are valued enough to warrant rain,
adored enough to be given fragrant winds,
loved enough to be granted the sight
of this glorious, cloud-strewn sky.