Sunday, December 3, 2023

Autumn



When autumn hits here,
the leaves tend not to fall.

They cling and quiver in the wind
like our disappointment in them

and the few that fall go slippery and annoy us.
The light, though, thaws our cold hearts

and we don’t even care we’re being cheesy
for a moment or so. Who needs

a new cliché? Not us, not
when there are bigger things to worry about –

and not when it’s still possible to put them aside
to look at the low shadows, the glow

of the evening sun across the branches
of the trees that refuse to be anything but green.


-- Jane Arthur, New Zealand poet and owner of Good Books bookshop in Wellington.

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