Fall Poems

I’ve been collecting some poems that focus on Autumn. They make me smile.

“An Autumn Bicycle-Ride” by Owen Barfield

"The leaves, grown rusty overhead,

Dropped on the road and made it red.

The air that coldly wrapped me round,

Stained by the glowing of the ground,

Had bathed the world in the cosy gloom

Of a great, red-carpeted, firelit room;

It filled my lungs, as I rode along,

Till they overflowed in a flood of song,

And joy grew truculent in my throat,

Uttering a pompous trombone-note;

For this elegant modern soul of mine

Was warm with old Autumn’s rich red wine."

They say that aspens propagate and grow

Not scattering seed-pods to whimsies of 

The wind, but from a common root below, 

   Which binds them surely each to all

And is their counterpart of human love, 

So that you’ll find no solitary tree, 

But in great stands arrayed against the cold

They seem to keep each other company

   And, at this apogee of fall, 

To cloak the mountainsides in cloth of gold.

- Matthew Brenneman

The Meaning of Grass
Your bones shall flourish like grass. Isaiah 66:14

To write about the lives of grass
you might want to inhabit a meadow,
maybe lying down for an hour, nestling in,
close to the earth, like an animal,
the seed-heads tasseling above you
in an air that smells hot and ripe and
primitive. A cricket or two. Bees bumbling
on wild clover. A hawk in the blue dome
arching over you. You invite a green juice
to flow in your veins for an hour or so,
for the stems to acquaint themselves with
your alien body, to know that you, with
a body that aches, that loves, that will fade,
that urges you to ground yourself, this day,
which is unlike every other day in your
breathing life. You doze, wake with a start,
knowing that the prophet had it right.
(Luci Shaw)

Stopping on a walk

Under the umbrella of

a maple on our street, a tent of light.

A dazzle of yellow, each leaf a lens,

a magnifying glass catching light

in its hand. Each hand scattering what brightness

filters through it, blessing the sidewalk.

In the gutter, a thousand flecks of gold leaf,

arranged as if on purpose.

My own self awash with foliar shine,

to gather against the dimming of the year.

(Luci Shaw)