An Autumn Land

This is an autumn land.

These people, they sit best in autumn

This grass feels greenest when it is muddy

The trees feel greatest when they shed themselves

The fields are ripest as they die.

This is the Autumn Isle.

Dressed in her carpet of leaves, she looks most like herself

With her crown of rain on darkened rivers

Rippled puddles reflected in the sallow streetlights

Stooped figures passing under cloudy sunsets with lowered eyes

Climbing damp trees and picking our way through muddy fields

This is my country as I remember her best.

Still, I wonder,

Did Caesar land on the shores of a Winter Isle?

Did Chaucer tread the grass of a land in spring?

Did summer shine on Shakespeare’s stage?

In short, have this people

Bastard children of Celtic-Roman-Christian-Angle-Saxon-Norman-Other parents

After such time of triumph and tribulation

Come to their autumnal years of existence?

Or, have these woods and fields always felt most comfortable

With measured death

And falling leaves.

Perhaps these stones are simply autumn stones

And this land knows its home lies between the last harvest and first frost.

I do not speak of the decline of Empire, eclipse of science, dearth of culture

Nor in fact any metaphor for slow death, anything other than what it claims to be:

An Autumn Island

Filled with autumn souls.