I thought this little poem was appropriate given that fall officially started on Saturday. This is definitely my favorite season, but I’m not sure why. Perhaps because the change is so swift and dramatic. The leaves turn and then fall off and the days grow cold and boom! It’s fall! Spring comes on in strides: the winds, and the rain, and the slowly greening plant life. Maybe there’s just something enrapturing about the sudden onset of a rainy, cold, death-ridden season, which should be dismal, but is not.

One day soon, maybe not this week,
Or the next, Our Lady Autumn will rise
From her long, deep slumber
With the remnants of a previous year’s
Merry-making caking her tawny eyes.

A long sigh will escape her lips
Out of the west and into our very woods,
And nestling there in the tree creaks
And cicada’s dying drones,
Will slowly sink towards earth.

Her shaggy robes, remended,
Will snap and beat the lingering warmth
Under the loamy rugs,
To join their own unrestful hibernation
Till Spring cleaning.

Autumn will then burst upwards,
Dousing in cold stillness the lifeblood
That beats faintly out of Summer’s weak heart.
And his fantastic death shrouds will blaze upon the pyre,
Then pale and tatter with a last wheeze.

In a sibilant rush, the Lady will dance
Here and there, making sure all is prepared
For her inaugural feast:
The lights strung up between branches, out of reach,
And the carpeting laid down layer on crunching layer.

Pumpkins and gourds arranged in
Colors that match the decorations,
Cider weeping out through smashed skins.
The brown brew dyes the harvest-producing death;
A funerial tribute to plenty.

At last we will make a solstice toast,
Raising glasses by firelight
To the last fading greenery.
And the mortal crowning of
Our Lady Autumn.

It appears that writing verse in the future tense is strange; too many uses of the world “will.” Anyone have suggestions to get around that?

One Response to “Our Lady Autumn”

1. Scott says:

   October 7, 2006 at 5:43 pm

   Wow, that’s really good. You wrote that? I like it. I’m not sure how one would get around the future tense, other than to write it as a vivid future – to preface it with a future tense, but then enter into the future and speak as if it were the present (as it inevitably will be). But I’ve got to say, your word choice is splendid. I especially like Autumn’s “tawny eyes” and the “loamy rugs”. There are others too, time and again the words seem to belong together: their sound is just right. I think it could use a little tweaking here and there, but portions of it are quite vivid and brimful poetry!