This home’s creaking floorboards foretell under footfall,
of the cool blankets of Autumn’s coming
when crisp leaves leave in waves of colorful retreat
from the swaying bone chill of the old tree limbs numbing.
The glaucous sky is crisscrossed by jet contrails
behind ten thousand starlings in whirling murmuration,
below the migration, scurrying gatherers of winter food stores
lay down their beds in hollowed trunk cores, tufted pillows for hibernation.
Hunter green seeds blush brittle, then turn sleep-gray dormant
there beneath a farmer’s haggard hands, dropping his scythe,
and in its place, the sharpened pen is swung each way, side to side,
to reap the message gestating in the golden grain of the Great Author’s sigh.
Seasons change in patterns of impassioned respirations,
performing the romantic dancing orbit of sun and earth;
lovers in flux, as pundits and poets fly to higher branches,
perching resolutely to sit this one out and simply observe.
Vacationers settle in low at the height of each solstice,
veiled from the promise over time change remains constant;
but dwelling on either side of the seasonal midterms,
for writers of variation, all but the edge of change, is truly dormant.
Rubaiyaat of Arthur Skip Maselli
🙂