Autumn Song

Image by Klaus Binder from Pixabay

Autumn brings us so many gifts: leafy rainbows of yellow, red, orange, and brown; the smell of woodsmoke in the air; apple picking; pumpkin carving; and the sweet, raucous pleasures of Halloween.

It brings us a very different sort of gift as well: a nudge to contemplate transient nature of life and all its pleasures.

Just as spring invites us to celebrate new beginnings, autumn reminds us that decay and death are woven into the fabric of life. Its beauty is inseparable from its losses, reminding us that our own sorrows and longings are part of the beautifully bittersweet cycles of nature.

Autumn Song

by Sarojini Naidu (1847 - 1949)

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.

Hark to a voice that is calling
   To my heart in the voice of the wind:
My heart is weary and sad and alone,
For its dreams like the fluttering leaves have gone,
   And why should I stay behind?

First published in the collection, The Golden Threshold (New York: John Lane Company, 1916).