The Quality of Autumn 

Pangs of the heart come as the days shorten with a kind of softening bitterness.

What will this end bring?

What will any end bring?

Something new?

For me?

I suspect more of the same.

Wheels upon wheels of an endless autumn, not one step further.

Where is my spring? Has she been lost in the depths of the winter?

A wandering widow who never again finds home?

I lay in the browning grass.

I feel the crunch of leaves in my palms.

I squeeze to feel the assemblage of their wreckage.

Bittersweet memories.

Sleepless nights.

I open my palm.

I am the fragments of leaves scattered on the backs of the wintering winds.

Naked.