autumn poem tagged posts

  ON WALKING IN BARREN WOODS, ALONE

       By Andrew Hidas

If these leaves were raindrops fallen to earth I would be slogging through mud above my shins, but dried and golden they instead yield with a delicate shrush, my only concern being to lend them my weight gingerly lest my ankle land on a hidden root or rock that sends me tumbling through the hushed forest where no other sound intrudes. Barely off the busy thoroughfare, these barren woods a sanctuary, a quietude, no engine roar nor backlit screen suggesting the constant thrum of all the otherness one shakes off one’s boots in pursuit of another rootedness, of self and silence, untethered under pure autumnal skies. This falling-fallen-decaying-renewing cycle, old as time itself, playing out from treetop to forest floor in an endless vertical loop, unmoved by humankind but subject nevertheless to its assaults...

Just the few of you left now,
your stubborn clinging spent,
a mighty December wind
sending you finally to freefall.

Reclined in the steaming waters,
I see you torn from your branch,
spinning violently, a micro tornado,
coming to rest smack in the middle

of my forehead.

You are small, seven-pronged, maple,
and as you become my third eye,
I look with renewed surprise heavenward,
your cycle now blessed and complete.

***

For periodic and brief posts of inspiring words from the world’s great thinkers and artists, accompanied by lovely photography from my Flickr friends, see my public Facebook page at: http://www.facebook.com/TraversingBlog

Twitter: @AndrewHidas

Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/93289242@N07/

Deep appreciation to photographer Elizabeth Haslam for use of the banner photos at the top of this page. Some rights reserved under Creative Commons licensing, see more at: https://www.flickr...

I have taken to walking the graveyard,
An oak-tree’d resting place
Under whose towering limbs
A treasure of autumn leaves and acorns fall.

Strangely soothing, this gliding above the dead,
Pausing to note a name, an age, doing the math,
Adding or subtracting my own advancing years in
A fruitless assessment of my place in line.

Fall’s fierce abiding beauty comes at a price,
Golden everywhere sans the dark abyss where it points,
Each October a plaintive call to arms and attention,
Open arms of a love, that is, and attention to time, precious time.

Under every stone, a story of one who breathed, perspired,
Dreamed, questioned, loved, risked—and suffered, of course—
As I suffer now running hard up the hill from the potter’s fields,
Toward the stone monuments of nobles who lie there just as dead.

Breathless, I walk again, blood coursing, eyes horizoned,
Seeking a still point around which everyday life ...