Fall Colors - a reading (on YouTube)
Fall colors the landscape,
Burning down the valleys,
Burning up the hillsides,
An ancient masque macabre.
Chartreuse oozes into yellow-green,
Amber drips like molten gold,
Crimson bleeds to garnet,
Carnelian fans each flame.
Coral filters through the maples,
A sunset glow at noon ,
A maiden’s red-faced dance before
Winter strips her brown limbs bare.
A gray wind whispers winter’s secret
Which the hollow clatter of
Her drifting leaves can’t keep.
Samaras flurry like first snow.
Oaks with bark like an old man’s forehead,
Deeply lined and grooved,
Concentrate on their Taoist painting
In water, wood and stone.
The forest’s ancient children
Dab their slender ankles
In the sweet scent of decay,
Their mother’s rich perfume.
Her fiery dance continues
Until his springtime bride shifts
The palette to livelier shades of
Supplely glowing green.
Her color falls
Like winter’s snow
Until darkness and decay
Hold sidereal dominion.
© 2016 Edward P. Morgan III
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ReplyDeleteNotes and asides:
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The second poem inspired by our 2014 driving tour to N. Georgia. One point of the trip was to see fall colors which we don’t get much in Florida. We succeeded spectacularly.
The line “A sunset glow at noon” is Karen’s. She tossed it out in Vogel State Park. I just cribbed it in my notebook (with her permission).
Samara is the biological name of those helicopter maples seeds.
Masque macabre is a play on the French Danse Macabre, the dance of death, the medieval allegory that unites us all.
“Until darkness and decay hold sidereal dominion” is a play on the closing line of Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death”.
Picture Notes:
ReplyDeleteThe colors at Vogel State Park on the last full day of the trip were both muted and vibrant. Muted in that it was a cloudy day, so no bright sun to light the leaves. But the overcast sky brought out the colors of the leaves in other ways. As a result, there were no hotspots of sunlight on the leaves and just a little tweaking in Photoshop made the colors pop. This particular set of leaves seemed to show the whole spectrum of possible colors, from green to yellow, and orange to red.