This Is Not a Poem About Autumn
Today, the leaves have shifted their
chameleon sheaths
from ivy green to fiery orange and blood
red.
I never foresee the coming, year after
year,
as August leans into September, and then
we become October
with our silver crowns and weathered
bodies.
But this is not a meditation on the
passage of time.
The practice of poetry is the art of
noticing,
and this time I vow to be there when it unfolds,
when the first frost seals the covering of
last year’s bulbs
and gray cloud tendrils encircle the earth
in cool swaths of sleep.
I’ve spent my whole life writing about
light and its persistence
but would you believe that I’ve nearly
missed witnessing
the way the light falls across the page on
which I write the word “behold”
or the way it bathes your soft brow in a
golden nimbus glow
and how, at the end, even as the color slowly
fades from head to toe
the light leaves a holy trail of ground
gold and gold ground.
Look, it’s not too late to rise up and see
even the tallest trees are holding on
another day,
broadcasting their brilliant secrets to
the earth below
before making their final bow—
That fiery flurry of orange, blood red.
That lucid dance of love.
Christen Lee
Christen
Lee is a family nurse practitioner in Cleveland, Ohio. Her writing has been
featured in the Literary Cleveland’s Voices from the Edge Anthology, Rue
Scribe, The Write Launch, Aurora, Humans of the World Blog, Sad
Girls Club, 2022 New Generation Beats Anthology, Wingless
Dreamer and is forthcoming in The Voices of Real 7 Compilation.