No Cure for Autumn

There is no cure for autumn.
No pretending the colors are anything but death,
temporary perhaps, but death none the less.
No pretending that Indian Summer
is anything but a reprieve
before the landscape is stripped
raw as winter.

There is no cure for autumn.
A fickle season, unpredictable
day to day, morning to night,
a new season every hour, a tease,
a torture, a gleeful child
with a knife.

There is no cure for autumn.
It comes. Year after year,
Slightly changed each season,
predictable as nightfall,
stealthy and silent, a slow, beautiful death.
And you are left to chronicle the colors,
to frame the season as a thing of beauty
anticipated
as you wait again for the spring.

About this poem

Across from my house, in the quarry, the leaves have already begun to change.

Depression is a chronic disease. You don’t cure it. You manage it. You fight it, but like the seasons, it comes. It goes. We are left to find the beauty in the season, or become a casualty.

It’s not romantic. It’s work.

From those two things, this poem.

Tom