The Fall of Leaf

 This fragile hold of thinning gold can run the heart full-through with grief

The beauty of each joy we love falls prey to ways of waning leaf

Like leaves that fall to deck the stage

Of places summer’s footsteps stirred

The poet pines to deck the page

With essence of loss hardly heard

To snare its sigh from dwindling tress

To bare the cry in human breast

To will to form the silent storm

And bleed its evidence to word

The heart is oft its own decoy

While caught in halos of leaf-gold

It trembles, torn twixt grief and joy

And staggers ‘neath the weightless hold

Of love that will turn into loss

Of longing, love’s sure albatross

Where like a vine it soft entwines

The steadiness of growing old

The random places that we go

From here to there and back again

Where bud dissolves in golden snow

And fills earth’s halls with muffled rain

Where we dance, held in ties that bind

And shawls unraveled by the wind

The poet’s sighs immortalize

The fall of leaf in ink refrain

© Janet Martin