The Burning of the Leaves

Image by Peggychoucair from Pixabay

Seeing leaves floating to the ground on a sunny autumn day nearly always takes me back to my childhood and the fun my siblings and I used to have with them. We made huge mounds of them to jump in. We buried each other in them and scared ourselves senseless rising from the dead. We waged war with them and made crowns with them. We carefully raked them into rooms and hallways where we played house and hosted tea parties. We ironed them between layers of wax paper and made crayon rubbings of their shapes and textures.

The adults, meanwhile, were mowing over them, bagging them, and burning them. We’ll never be like that, we thought; we’ll never forget how to have fun with leaves.

The Burning of The Leaves

by Robert Laurence Binyon (1869-1943)

Now is the time for the burning of the leaves.
They go to the fire; the nostril pricks with smoke
Wandering slowly into a weeping mist.
Brittle and blotched, ragged and rotten sheaves!
A flame seizes the smouldering ruin and bites
On stubborn stalks that crackle as they resist.

The last hollyhock's fallen tower is dust;
All the spices of June are a bitter reek,
All the extravagant riches spent and mean.
All burns! The reddest rose is a ghost;
Sparks whirl up, to expire in the mist: the wild
Fingers of fire are making corruption clean.

Now is the time for stripping the spirit bare,
Time for the burning of days ended and done,
Idle solace of things that have gone before:
Rootless hope and fruitless desire are there;
Let them go to the fire, with never a look behind.
The world that was ours is a world that is ours no more.

They will come again, the leaf and the flower, to arise
From squalor of rottenness into the old splendour,
And magical scents to a wondering memory bring;
The same glory, to shine upon different eyes.

Excerpt from the full poem, originally published in 1944 by MacMillian & Co.