One Leaf

You see it and something in you wakens.
This is not the season for color.
It is the season of grey skies, grey stone,
naked grey trees standing forlornly in the quarry.

It is the season of cold, implacable and cancerous,
a leeching thing, mindless in it’s hate,
in it’s drawing out each breath of life
and leaving you with nothing.

It is the season where animals burrow away,
birds flee and lovers and children go inside
and only dead things remain.

But here it is.
Color.
A single leaf perhaps,
but perfect,
somehow resisting
the decay,
resiting nature and time,
s declaration of war
against the death that claimes everything around you
and almost claimed you
as well.

About this poem

It doesn’t read like a love poem. But it is.

Tom