R.E. Slater - Autumn Wonder + Other Fall Poems

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

Autumn wonders

Makes me happy

Rolling and tumbling

On crunchy leaves

Smelling their colors

Hearing their crinkles

Beauty bursting all around.

R.E. Slater

November 4, 2023

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

all rights reserved

When the leaves

are on the ground

I like to make

a pile of them

way up to my knees.

- Anon

Red, yellow, orange, and brown,

Leaves are falling all around,

See them dancing in the wind,

Twisting, falling, fairykins,

Swooshing, blowing, here and there,

Happy, running, dervish flares!

R.E. Slater

November 4, 2023

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

all rights reserved

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

Leaves

by Elsie N. Brady

How silently they tumble down

And come to rest upon the ground

To lay a carpet, rich and rare,

Beneath the trees without a care,

Content to sleep, their work well done,

Colors gleaming in the sun.

At other times, they wildly fly

Until they nearly reach the sky.

Twisting, turning through the air

Till all the trees stand stark and bare.

Exhausted, drop to earth below

To wait, like children, for the snow.

Theme in Yellow

by Carl Sandburg

I spot the hills

With yellow balls in autumn.

I light the prairie cornfields

Orange and tawny gold clusters

And I am called pumpkins.

On the last of October

When dusk is fallen

Children join hands

And circle round me

Singing ghost songs

And love to the harvest moon;

I am a jack-o'-lantern

With terrible teeth

And the children know

I am fooling.

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

Nothing Gold Can Stay

by Robert Frost

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

To Autumn

by John Keats

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook;

Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

Fall, leaves, fall

by Emily Bronte

Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;

Lengthen night and shorten day;

Every leaf speaks bliss to me

Fluttering from the autumn tree.

I shall smile when wreaths of snow

Blossom where the rose should grow;

I shall sing when night’s decay

Ushers in a drearier day.

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

SONNET 73:

That time of year thou

mayst in me behold

by William Shakespeare

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou see'st the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west,

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the death-bed whereon it must expire,

Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.

This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

The Heat of Autumn Poem

by Jane Hirshfield

The heat of autumn

is different from the heat of summer.

One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider.

One is a dock you walk out on,

the other the spine of a thin swimming horse

and the river each day a full measure colder.

A man with cancer leaves his wife for his lover.

Before he goes she straightens his belts in the closet,

rearranges the socks and sweaters inside the dresser

by color. That's autumn heat:

her hand placing silver buckles with silver,

gold buckles with gold, setting each

on the hook it belongs on in a closet soon to be empty,

and calling it pleasure.

First Fall

by Maggie Smith

I’m your guide here. In the evening-dark

morning streets, I point and name.

Look, the sycamores, their mottled,

paint-by-number bark. Look, the leaves

rusting and crisping at the edges.

I walk through Schiller Park with you

on my chest. Stars smolder well

into daylight. Look, the pond, the ducks,

the dogs paddling after their prized sticks.

Fall is when the only things you know

because I’ve named them

begin to end. Soon I’ll have another

season to offer you: frost soft

on the window and a porthole

sighed there, ice sleeving the bare

gray branches. The first time you see

something die, you won’t know it might

come back. I’m desperate for you

to love the world because I brought you here.

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

Poem

by Paul Carroll

Fall a scrimmage of yellow leaves today

All over Lincoln Park

like the mask of the Yellow Mule who travels between the next

world and Tibet inside its house of glass in the Field

Museum by the lake.

I am carrying the night.

I am carrying it as if it were a dark blue dish with stars

for the dinner of the Dalai Lama.

It is the sky two nights ago;

Its voluptuous rich blue looks almost black before the word

for blue had been invented;

The clouds like continents, like huge, majestic prehistoric

creatures moving in a dance;

The stars are brilliant ants. They may have died

a billion years ago.

I feel so happy. It is as if I'm with my wife who's making

sculpture miles and miles away on Ada Street.

I like everything about her.

The way an angel, say, might look upon this early autumn scene

and love everything about it for its reality—

These trees flanking the lagoon at Fullerton are quiet as green fish,

The pale khaki maple leaf lying on the ground, its veins

intricate as the practice of a Tartar cavalry,

Its delicacy like the penis of a cuttlefish,

The grass pale lime and brown as dreams when they are turning brown

Is almost ghostly,

The way the family album on the table in the living room has

a gallery of ghosts.

There is only wonder.

Like the wonder in the worn thighbone of the dinosaur

We're allowed to touch

As often as we want on the Main Floor of the Field Museum.

I bike along the lake and watch

The whiplash of the waves and think,

I didn't have to be here in the first place: I could have been

a star:

Or cuttlefish. The shadow of that tree. Or been one of the

bees of oblivion

In any ordinary orgasm.

If there were no moon our hearts could take its place.

Autumn

by Alice Cary

Shorter and shorter now the twilight clips

The days, as though the sunset gates they crowd,

And Summer from her golden collar slips

And strays through stubble-fields, and moans aloud,

Save when by fits the warmer air deceives,

And, stealing hopeful to some sheltered bower,

She lies on pillows of the yellow leaves,

And tries the old tunes over for an hour.

The wind, whose tender whisper in the May

Set all the young blooms listening through th’ grove,

Sits rustling in the faded boughs to-day

And makes his cold and unsuccessful love.

The rose has taken off her tire of red—

The mullein-stalk its yellow stars have lost,

And the proud meadow-pink hangs down her head

Against earth’s chilly bosom, witched with frost.

The robin, that was busy all the June,

Before the sun had kissed the topmost bough,

Catching our hearts up in his golden tune,

Has given place to the brown cricket now.

The very cock crows lonesomely at morn—

Each flag and fern the shrinking stream divides—

Uneasy cattle low, and lambs forlorn

Creep to their strawy sheds with nettled sides.

Shut up the door: who loves me must not look

Upon the withered world, but haste to bring

His lighted candle, and his story-book,

And live with me the poetry of Spring.

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

November for Beginners

by Rita Dove

Snow would be the easy

way out—that softening

sky like a sigh of relief

at finally being allowed

to yield. No dice.

We stack twigs for burning

in glistening patches

but the rain won’t give.

So we wait, breeding

mood, making music

of decline. We sit down

in the smell of the past

and rise in a light

that is already leaving.

We ache in secret,

memorizing

a gloomy line

or two of German.

When spring comes

we promise to act

the fool. Pour,

rain! Sail, wind,

with your cargo of zithers!

November 1981

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications