Color
comes up
from deep down:
bare boughs flout gravity
to channel hidden sap skyward,
conspiring to bury old winter’s brown
beneath new summer’s green, rich and deep.
But the baby leaves on trees’ innumerable fingertips
wear, a moment, autumn’s many colors; shy-soft, though,
not cold-crisp like the old leaves’, the generation now past.
Most in day’s late light, sun at farthest west,
do autumn’s colors live briefly on eastward hills,
gently vivid in the sun’s cool caress:
haunting of autumn, last and next.
Though leaves will grow green,
they pause at birth,
a brief reminder:
we’ll not
last.

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.