Survivors

The leaf lies on a bed of pine tags,
the only thing of color left
as the weather shifts from October to November,
from fall to winter and all around you
limbs fall naked and raw,
flower stalks become corpses
and the last few birds have fled.

I am fond of survivors,
of the broken ones that cling to their beauty
long past the due date, long past
the brokenness,
defiant,
colorful,
daring
to be an interruption in a landscape
of surrender.

About this poem

Like so many of my poems, more about people than the subject would indicate.

The picture was taken on the way to the mill pond on my family farm in Surry Virginia.

It began to snow today.

That’s how poems come.

Tom