Out of Season

It is early in the season for the leaves to be stripped
of their color, raw before the frost, out of season,
not quite dead, but feeling it
as you look across the wetlands remembering
your own dead seasons, too soon, too vivid
for you to have possibly survived,
and yet, like the trees above you
naked against the sky, you are here,
more aware than they that there are seasons
and you survive them, even when
they don’t exactly follow the timelines,
dying in the spring, finding love in the winter,
the odd flower that blooms in the January snow.

About this poem

Some of us are late bloomers. Some of us die young. Some of us do both. Seasons, it seems, are not as linear as they would have us believe.

Tom