Autumn Leaves
This month’s prompts are all inspired by the autumn season when everything comes to fruition in the natural world and we begin to think of shutting down for the Winter.
Autumn seems to create a sense of an ending as Eva Cassidy shows in her live recording of The Autumn Song. Having said that because this can also represent a season of new beginnings as seeds fall waiting for the Spring when they will be reignited into growth.
So what does Eva’s song inspire you to create? Is it a poem, a story, a memory? Why not leave your inspiration in the comments below?
And here’s my effort .. please be kind 🙂
Autumn, the word summons up misty mornings and that faint smell of wood smoke and wet earth which permeated everything from our clothes to the animals in the fields. There was a sense that another cycle was coming to completion and when Dad brought in the first of the apple juice pressed from the fallen pickings we were reminded that soon it would be cold and we should make an effort to enjoy the Indian summer and warmth while it lasted.
Yes, Linda! Woodsmoke and wet earth… now I might just nick that for a title. 🙂
…So, this is how it starts, my tale of “Woodsmoke and Wet Earth”…
“Woodsmoke and wet earth, scents of warmth, and the coming of the cold.
Wet earth, and leaf-fall days, clouds now grey, and the year growing old.
Leaf-fall days, and prayers for seeding: new growth, green again after gold.”
Wasn’t that how it went, the old incantation? Wasn’t that what I was supposed to learn?
And oh, how well I learned it! How deeply I bought into all the sad songs of autumn, of falling leaves, and lost loves, and life ending. Necessarily giving into smoke and damp and melancholy. Mustiness and tears. Graveyards and dripping birch branches, leaves falling like yellow rain-drops.
{there’s more but I’m still working on this one – thanks for the prompt!}
You’re welcome Lesley – how did it go? Finishing or working on it more. I get a sense that you’re almost invoking Eva Cassidy with this one.
No, this is very much a work in progress. I don’t even know it’s direction yet.
I shall look forward to seeing more as it develops then Lesley 🙂
A short poem about Autumn I wrote a couple of years ago:
Autumn is filled with the saddest of sounds:
The wheeze of a breeze as it hustles the leaves;
The gush of the rain as it rushes and splutters;
As splinters of sun seep through cracks in black clouds.
The creak of old trees that speak of the cold
Which soon will arrive with the whip of a winter,
Stripping away both the dead and the dying
To leave woodland floors with heaps of old gold.
What a wonderful phrase to end on ‘heaps of old gold’, it holds a promise in there somewhere Wally.
That wheeze of the breeze… I guess it depends on where we come from or where we are, but for me that rustling of wind through leaves is one of the more playful sounds of the year. I love it. And that’s the intrigue of poetry – how differently we are made to look at things.
It’s a bit like the sound made when you kick through the leaves in Autumn, still one of my favourite things to do with my dogs.
Summer leaves
Farewell summer
with your promises of joy,
bare bodies ripening in the sun
turning all shades of brown
like Autumn leaves,
that flutter in the wind
And slowly fall, exhausted,
to the ground.
Very evocative Jane and it’s happening early this year too.
Shades of sadness in that one.