Hello everyone!

I hope you all are doing well. Welcome to another edition of poetics.

Leaving the soup bubbling gently on the stove, I pick my book (abandoned a couple of months ago) and sink in my favourite chair with cup of chai, delicately flavoured with ginger and fennel seeds.  From the window I can see the sky; a clear blue with a smattering of wispy clouds. Though the days are still warm, nights are cool and crisp and early mornings a bit misty. The abundant rains this monsoon turned my surroundings into a green oasis. Now, the various hues of green on trees are beginning to turn pale. It is the onset of ‘patjhad’ or falling leaves season here.

Autumn, the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” has inspired multitude of writers and continues to do so. Any thing and everything the season of autumn signifies, has been written about. I tend to agree with Capote when he says, “Aprils have never meant much to me, autumns seem that season of beginning, spring.” and John Donne, “No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace, as I have seen in one autumnal face.”

The swirling falling leaves inspired Emily Bronte to write

“Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;

Lengthen night and shorten day;

Every leaf speaks bliss to me

Fluttering from the autumn tree.“

And Emily Dickinson found

“The morns are meeker than they were,

The nuts are getting brown;

The berry’s cheek is plumper,

The rose is out of town.”

Fall season can be potent and poignant at the same time;  a time to stop and take stock as well as a time to rejuvenate and brace self for winter that can be harsh. It is usually also tinged with a touch of melancholy; a season of loss and letting go, of acceptance of what will be, but it’s also a season of reaping the bounty of harvest and of abundance.

“Like a joy on the heart of a sorrow,
The sunset hangs on a cloud;
A golden storm of glittering sheaves,
Of fair and frail and fluttering leaves,
The wild wind blows in a cloud.”

From Autumn Song by Sarojini Naidu

I know we all feel differently about the Fall season but surely an autumn poem a year is not too much to ask! It is definitely a wonderful season to let words fall onto the blank page. As Wallace Stegner put it: “Another fall, another turned page.” Since falling leaves and a palette of colours and emotions are a leitmotif of autumn, let’s write a poem that includes colours or leaves and of course it can be about love or loss too!

(I have just recently taken to growing plants in pots and I have been told that autumn is the season for planting bulbs. It does sound somewhat like sowing hope – something to hold on to when a long bitter winter bites, that once again leaves will sprout. I can certainly sing paeans to that.)

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