FALLEN
you spent much of your summer
under the sun, on a grassy hillside
with nearby trees to run to whenever
the sun blazed so bright it burned your skin.

you had some comforting days
in the shadows
when the winds came in warm wafts
and rustled the adolescent leaves about
your sheltered, ungrateful, happy head.
but where were you when the leaves fell?
innocently, one by one, in varying shades of beauty.
your feet rustled through carcasses but your eyes were on the
horizon, on dying trees as they shone out their last light.

"what a beautiful sight," you said to horizon and sky,
to the leaves on the ground, dead corpses that you
mistook for angels when the wind caught them
momentarily as they plummeted to their deaths.

your neighbors raked and bagged the casualties and shipped
them off somewhere, or burned them in their backyards.
the only evidence that remained was the scent
of the leaves, lingering briefly in the crisp air.

you watched children jumping in the leaves
and eyed your rake, wishing that the sad task
of burying the dead could still be the same game you played
as you hid, giggling in the leaves, waiting to be found.

but your blanket of leaves has become filthy
it is soiled and rotten and smothers the dying grass.
the sun is absent and the winds are fierce and
only ever slap your bitter, frozen face.

you should clean up this mess that you lie in
if you ever expect your lawn to bloom next summer
but you never finish what you start, and your rake
will soon be buried with the leaves under blankets of snow.

you never see the sun anymore and when you do
it seems so cold and distant and is always disappearing
into the greyness, leaving you to stand alone and catch
the flakes that the sky spits in your hair, as winter sets in.

"nothing's permanent," you remind yourself. the seasons
will eventually change and the sun will return.
there will be new leaves, the trees will come alive,
and the grass will be green and soft and inviting.

but you have forgotten about the rake and your dead.
when the sun returns to melt away your blindness,
you will find the lost carcasses that choke your grounds
and you will find yourself as before, surrounded by the fallen.

©Copyright 2003 Sheila Cook.