AUTUMN

AUTUMN

"For man, autumn is a time of harvest, of gathering together.  
For nature, it is a time of sowing, of scattering abroad."
-   Edwin Way Teale

"I cannot endure to waste anything as precious as autumn sunshine by staying in the house.  
So I spend almost all the daylight hours in the open air.
-  Nathaniel Hawthorne

"I love the fall.  I love it because of the smells that you speak of; and also because things are dying, 
things that you don't have to take care of anymore, and the grass stops growing."
-  Mark Van Doren

"Delicious autumn!  My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth 
seeking the successive autumns." 
-   George Eliot

"Once more the liberal year laughs out
O'er richer stores than gems or gold:
Once more with harvest song and shout
Is nature's boldest triumph told."
-   John Greenleaf Whittier

"A few days ago I walked along the edge of the lake and was treated to the crunch and rustle of leaves with each step I made.  The acoustics of this season are different and all sounds, no matter how hushed, are as crisp as autumn air."
-   Eric Sloane

"The Indian Summer, the dead Summer's soul."
-  Mary Clemmer, Presence

"It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life." 
-  P. D. James

"In the garden, Autumn is, indeed the crowning glory of the year, bringing us the fruition of months of thought and care and toil.  And at no season, safe perhaps in Daffodil time, do we get such superb  colour effects as from August to November."
-   Rose G. Kingsley, The Autumn Garden, 1905

"Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting
and autumn a mosaic of them all."
-   Stanley Horowitz

"There is a harmony 
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky, 
Which through the summer is not heard or seen, 
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!" 
-   Percy Bysshe Shelley  

"The leaves fall, the wind blows, and the farm country slowly
changes from the summer cottons into its winter wools."
-   Henry Beston, Northern Farm

"Listen!  the wind is rising, and the air is wild with leaves, 
We have had our summer evenings, now for October eves!"
-  Humbert Wolfe

"The crocuses and the larch turning green every year a week before the others
and the pastures red with uneaten sheep's placentas and the long summer days
and the newmown hay and the wood pigeon in the morning and the cuckoo in
the afternoon and the corncrake in the evening and the wasps in the jam and the
smell of grose and the look of the gorse and the apples falling and the children
walking in the dead leaves and the larch turning brown a week before the others
and the chestnuts falling and the howling winds and the sea breaking over the
pier and the first fires and the hooves on the road and the consumptive postman
whistling "The Roses are Blooming in Picardy" and the standard oil-lamp and of
course the snow and to be sure the sleet and bless your heart the slush and
every fourth year the February debacle and the endless April showers and the
crocuses and then the whole bloody business starting all over again."
-   Samuel Beckett, Watt

"The milkweed pods are breaking,
And the bits of silken down
Float off upon the autumn breeze
Across the meadows brown."
-   Cecil Cavendish, The Milkweed

"Winter is cold-hearted.
Spring is yea and nay,
Autumn is a weather-cock,
Blown every way.
Summer days for me.
When every leaf is on its tree."
 - Christina Rossetti

"Then summer fades and passes and October comes.  We'll smell smoke then,
and feel an unexpected sharpness, a thrill of nervousness, swift elation, a
sense of sadness and departure."
-   Thomas Wolfe

"Lo! sweeten’d with the summer light,
The full-juiced apple, waxing over-mellow,
Drops in a silent autumn night.
All its allotted length of days
The flower ripens in its place,
Ripens and fades, and falls, and hath no toil,
Fast-rooted in the fruitful soil."
-   Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Lotus-Eaters

"In the other gardens
And all up the vale,
From the autumn bonfies
See the smoke trail!

Pleasant summer over
And all the summer flowers,
The red fire blazes,
the grey smoke towers.

Sing a song of seasons!
Something bright in all,
Flowers in the summer
Fires in the fall! "
-   Robert Louis Stevenson, Autumn Fires

"Autumn is the eternal corrective. It is ripeness and color and a time of maturity;
but it is also breadth, and depth, and distance.  What man can stand with autumn
on a hilltop and fail to see the span of his world and the meaning of the rolling
hills that reach to the far horizon?
-   Hal Borland

"cirrus sky hawk drift
blue haze in the autumn air
and my mouth is dry"
-   Greg Boddy

"There is no season such delight can bring,
As summer, autumn, winter and the spring."
-   William Browne, Variety, 1630  

"autumn is leaving -
tugging each others' branches
two pine trees"
-   Shiki's Autumn Poems  

"O Autumn, laden with fruit, and stained
With the blood of the grape, pass not, but sit
Beneath my shady roof; there thou may'st rest,
And tune thy jolly voice to my fresh pipe;
And all the daughters of the year shall dance!
Sing now the lusty song of fruit and flowers.
-  William Blake, To Autumn, 1783

"When I speak
My lips feel cold - 
The autumn wind."
-   Basho

"Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower."
-  Albert Camus

"The hazy, cloudless skies of Indian Summer. Leaves scurrying down the street
before the wind. The cold shiver from an arctic blast. Indian Summer. The last
warmth of the sun. Chilly mornings and glorious warm afternoons. The Harvest
Moon. The Hunter's Moon. The Rainy Season. Dry corn stalks clattering in the
wind. The touch of frost on grass and window pane. The smell of burning leaves."
-   Keith C. Heidorn  

"There ought to be gardens for all months in the year,
in which, severally, things of beauty may be then in season."
-  Sir Francis Bacon

"Autumn is a season followed immediately by looking forward to Spring."
-  Anonymous

"I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the
landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter.
Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show." 
-   Andrew Wyeth

"On such a day each road is planned
To lead to some enchanted land;
Each turning meets expectancy.
The signs I read on every hand.
I know by autumn's wizardry
On such a day the world can be
Only a great glad dream for me--
Only a great glad dream for me!"
-   Eleanor Myers Jewett, An Autumn Day

"It is only her in large portions of Canada that wonderous second wind,
the Indian summer, attains its amplitude and heavenly perfection, -- the
temperatures; the sunny haze; the mellow, rich delicate, almost
flavoured air: Enough to live -- enough to merely be."
-   Walt Whitman, Diary in Canada

"Seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells."
-   John Keats, To Autumn  

"Autumn begins with a subtle change in the light, with skies
a deeper blue, and nights that become suddenly clear and
chilled.  The season comes full with the first frost, the
disappearance of migrant birds, and the harvesting of
the season's last crops."
-   Glenn Wolff and Jerry Dennis  

"Thy bounty shines in autumn unconfined
And spreads a common feast for all that live."
-   James Thomson

"No Spring nor Summer Beauty hath such grace 
As I have seen in one Autumnal face." 
-   John Donne

"Spring flowers are long since gone.   Summer's bloom hangs limp on every terrace.  
The gardener's feet drag a bit on the dusty path and the hinge in his back is full of creaks."
-  Louise Seymour Jones

"Gray drip-wet dawn
Leafless tree in solitude -
Remembers the robin."
-  Don Sax

"Behold congenial Autumn comes,
the Sabbath of the Year."
-  John Logan, 1748 - 1788

"Come said the wind to 
the leaves one day, 
Come o're the meadows 
and we will play. 
Put on your dresses 
scarlet and gold, 
For summer is gone 
and the days grow cold." 
-  A Children's Song of the 1880's

"October's poplars are flaming torches lighting the way to winter."
-   Nova Bair

"The wind-blown leaves turn
Dancing the golden sunlight
across the tired floor."
-   Matt Dimmic

"My heart is a garden tired with autumn,
Heaped with bending asters and dahlias heavy and dark,
In the hazy sunshine, the garden remembers April,
The drench of rains and a snow-drop quick and clear as a spark; 

Daffodils blowing in the cold wind of morning,
And golden tulips, goblets holding the rain --
The garden will be hushed with snow, forgotten soon, forgotten --
After the stillness, will spring come again?"
-   Sara Teasdale, The Garden

"Summer is already better, but the best is autumn.
It is mature, reasonable and serious, it glows
moderately and not frivolously ... It cools down,
clears up, makes you reasonable ..."
- Valentin

"When the bold branches
Bid farewell to rainbow leaves -
Welcome wool sweaters."
-   B. Cybrill 

"The winds will blow their own freshness into you,
and the storms their energy,
while cares will drop away from you
like the leaves of Autumn."
-   John Muir

"Youth is like spring, an over praised season more remarkable for
biting winds than genial breezes.  Autumn is the mellower season,
and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits." 
-  Samuel Butler

"Give me the end of the year an' its fun 
When most of the plannin' an' toilin' is done; 
Bring all the wanderers home to the nest, 
Let me sit down with the ones I love best, 
Hear the old voices still ringin' with song, 
See the old faces unblemished by wrong, 
See the old table with all of its chairs 
An' I'll put soul in my Thanksgivin' prayers." 
-   Edgar A. Guest, Thanksgiving

"She calls it "stick season," this slow disrobing of summer,
leaf by leaf, till the bores of tall trees rattle and scrape in the wind."
-   Eric Pinder

"Autumn arrives in the early morning, 
but spring at the close of a winter day." 
-   Elizabeth Bowen

"The Sussex lanes were very lovely in the autumn ... spendthrift gold
and glory of the year-end ... earth scents and the sky winds and all the
magic of the countryside which is ordained for the healing of the soul."
-   Monica Baldwin, I Leap over the Wall

"Listen ...
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break free from the trees
And fall."
-   Adelaide Crapsey, 1878-1914, November Night

"January cold and desolate;
February dripping wet;
March wind ranges;
April changes;
Birds sing in tune
To flowers of May,
And sunny June
Brings longest day;
In scorched July
The storm-clouds fly,
Lightning-torn;
August bears corn,
September fruit;
In rough October
Earth must disrobe her;
Stars fall and shoot
In keen November;
And night is long
And cold is strong
In bleak December."
-   Christina Giorgina Rossetti, The Months

"Nature is, above all, profligate.   Don't believe them when they tell you how 
economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil.   
Wouldn't it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place?"
-   Annie Dillard

"When everything that ticked has stopped,
And space stares, all around,
Or grisly frosts, first autumn morns,
Repeal the beating ground."
-   Emily Dickinson, Time and Eternity, LXXV

"I love fall! Fall is exciting.
It's apples and cider.
It's an airborne spider.
It's pumpkins in bins.
It's burrs on dog's chins.
It's wind blowing leaves.
It's chilly red knees.
It's nuts on the ground.
It's a crisp dry sound.
It's green leaves turning
And the smell of them burning.
It's clouds in the sky.
It's fall. That's why...
I love fall."
-   Author Unknown

"The spiked iron gate
Grasps feebly at darkened trees -
Graveyard moon rises"
-   Morpheus

"The wind that makes music in November corn is in a hurry.
The stalks hum, the loose husks whisk skyward in half-playing
swirls, and the wind hurries on.... A tree tries to argue, bare
limbs waving, but there is no detaining the wind."
-   Aldo Leopold

  

"Change is a measure of time and, in the autumn, 
time seems speeded up.  What was is not and never 
again will be; what is is change."
-  Edwin Teale

"old pear tree
            starlings announce
harvest time"
-  Philip Noble, Autumn Haiku

   

"A tangerine and russet cascade
Of kaleidoscopic leaves
Creates a tapestry of autumn magic
Upon the emerald carpet of fading summer."
-  Judith A. Lindberg, Shades of Autumn

"The autumn breeze rises
on the shore at Fukiage--
and those white chrysanthemums
are they flowers? or not?
or only breakers on the beach?"
-   Sugawara Michizane

"You ought to know that October is the first Spring month."
-  Karel Capek, The Gardener's Year

"Ah! the year is slowly dying,
And the wind in tree-top sighing,
Chant his requiem.
Thick and fast the leaves are falling,
High in air wild birds are calling,
Nature's solemn hymn."
-   Mary Weston Fordham, Passing of the Old Year

"The stripped and shapely
Maple grieves
The ghosts of her
Departed leaves.

The ground is hard,
As hard as stone.
The year is old,
The birds are flown."
-   John Updike

"Corn wind in the fall, come off the black lands,
come off the whisper of the silk hangers,
the lap of the flat spear leaves."
-   Carl Sandburg

"Splitting dry kindling
on a damp November day -
wind-chimes tinkling."
-    Michael P. Garofalo, Cuttings

"The leaves are falling, falling as from way off,
as though far gardens withered in the skies;
they are falling with denying gestures.
And in the nights the heavy earth is falling
from all the stars down into loneliness.
We all are falling. This hand falls.
And look at others: it is in them all.
And yet there is one who holds this falling
endlessly gently in his hands."
-  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Autumn

"Everyone must take time to sit and watch the leaves turn."
-   Elizabeth Lawrence

"By all these lovely tokens
September days are here
With summer's best of weather
And autumn's best of cheer."
-  Author Unknown

"Our judgment ripens; our imagination decays. 
We cannot at once enjoy the flowers of the 
Spring of life and the fruits of its Autumn." 
-   Thomas Macaulay

"In every month, yet in aught begun,
Read over that month, what avails to be done;
So neither this travail shall seem to be lost,
Nor thou to repent of this trifling cost."
-   Author Unknown 

"Ere, in the northern gale,
The summer tresses of the trees are gone, 
The woods of Autumn, all around our vale, 
Have put their glory on."
-  William Cullen Bryant, Autumn Woods

"You can't hide your true colours as you approach the autumn of your life."

"Let autumn be ended appropriately with a snowstorm, with a vague
moving whiteness turning grey and night approaches, with snow
settling down or streaking or swirling in aerial eddies."
-   Paul Errington

"Leaf falling on leaf,
on mounds of leaves, rain splashing
in pools of rain ..."
-   Gyodai

"Bright summer days are now over, 
Green leaves will all soon be gone, 
Fresh landscapes are turning golden 
Like solid rays of the sun. 
Lingering trees in the distance 
Filling my heart to the most, 
My life will turn in the meantime 
Into unsubstantial ghost." 
-  Autumn

"The season for enjoying the fullness of life -- partaking of the harvest,
sharing the harvest with others, and reinvesting and saving portions
of the harvest for yet another season of growth."
-   Denis Waitley

"How innocent were these Trees, that in 
Mist-green May, blown by a prospering breeze, 
Stood garlanded and gay; 
Who now in sundown glow
Of serious colour clad confront me with their show
As though resigned and sad,
Trees, who unwhispering stand umber, bronze, gold; 
Pavilioning the land for one grown tired and old;
Elm, chestnut, aspen and pine, I am merged in you, 
Who tell once more in tones of time, 
Your foliaged farewell."
-   Siegfried Sassoon, October Trees

"Now the frost is in the air.
Blue the haze at early dawn.
There is color everywhere.
Old and ragged looks the lawn.
Autumn's resting on the hills.
Harvested are fruit and grain,
And the home with gladness thrills.
Buckwheat cakes are back again!
Every season has its joys,
Every day its touch of mirth.
For us all - both girls and boys -
God has well supplied the earth.
What if care must fall between
Peace and pleasure now and then?
Autumn holds this happy scene:
Buckwheat cakes are back again!
Time and trouble change us all,
Youth gives way to middle age,
One by one our fancies fall
Till we reach life's final stage,
But in spite of aches and panes
And the difference old age makes,
Man devoted still remains
To a stack of buckwheat cakes."
-   Edgar A. Guest, Buckwheat Cakes

"Here is the dark tree
Denuded now
Of leafage...
But a million stars"
-   Shiki

"No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member -
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds -
November!"
-   Thomas Hood

"For the Fall of the year is more than three months bounded by
an equinox and a solstice.  It is a summing up without the
finality of year's end."
-   Hal Borland

"Autumn - the reprieve from Summer."
-  Mike Garofalo, Pulling Onions

"Any night now frost may blacken the last crotalarias, zinnias, marigolds, and chrysanthemums.   
But, when the dead branches have been cleared away, there will still be the green of the ivy, 
the grey of santolina, and the scarlet fruit of the firethorn."
-   Elizabeth Lawrence

"My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off."
-   Robert Frost, After Apple Picking

"It is autumn; not without 
But within me is the cold. 
Youth and spring are all about; 
It is I that have grown old."
-  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Autumn Within

"All in November's soaking mist
We stand and prune the naked tree,
While all our love and interest
Seem quenched in the blue-nosed misery."
-   Ruth Pitter, 1897-1992, The Diehards, 1941

"late autumn twilight
burial wreath on the door
rises in the wind"
-  Sondra Ball,  Night Haiku

"The autumn breeze rises
on the shore at Fukiage--
and those white chrysanthemums
are they flowers? or not?
or only breakers on the beach?"
-   Sugawara Michizane,  890 CE, Japanese Poetry

"I see, when I bend close, how each leaflet of a climbing rose is
bordered with frost, the autumn counterpart of the dewdrops of
summer dawns.  The feathery leaves of yarrow are thick with
silver rime and dry thistle heads rise like goblets plated with
silver catching the sun."
-   Edwin Way Teale

"Deep inside, we're still the boys of autumn, 
that magic time of the year that once 
swept us onto America's fields." 
-  Archie Manning, American football player

"Vari-colored leaves
waft at wind's gentle prodding--
Autumn rites recur"
-  Victor Gendrano

"The back door
    bangs shut!
September gust."
-  Mike Garofalo, Cuttings

"I sit quietly, listening to the falling leaves -
A lonely hut, a life of renunciation.
The past has faded, things are no longer remembered,
My sleeve is wet with tears."
-   Ryokan, 1758-1831
    One Robe, One Bowl, Translated by John Stevens

"It was Indian summer, a bluebird sort of day as we call it in the north,
warm and sunny, without a breath of wind; the water was sky-blue,
the shores a bank of solid gold."
-   Sigurd Olson

"Soon we will plunge ourselves into cold shadows,
And all of summer's stunning afternoons will be gone.
I already hear the dead thuds of logs below
Falling on the cobblestones and the lawn." 
-  Charles Baudelaire, Autumn Song

"There ought to be Gardens for all Months in the year, in which,
severally, things of Beauty may be then in season."
-   Sir Francis Bacon

"Orchards Smiling through departed leaves,
Like diamond sapphires in evening sun
Hang ripening fruit and from the eaves
Grey sparrows make unending run,
Oh happy land, Bless thy fertile soil,
Oh happy people born to work and prayer,
With God to guide and strength to toil,
With heart and help goes will and power."
-   Alex Doherty, Autumn Leaves 

"I know the year is dying,
Soon the summer will be dead.
I can trace it in the flying
Of the black crows overhead;
I can hear it in the rustle
Of the dead leaves as I pass,
And the south wind's plaintive sighing
Through the dry and withered grass.

Ah, 'tis then I love to wander,
Wander idly and alone,
Listening to the solemn music
Of sweet nature's undertone;
Wrapt in thoughts I cannot utter,
Dreams my tongue cannot express,
Dreams that match the autumn's sadness
In their longing tenderness."
-  Mortimer Crane Brown, Autumn Dreams

"Autumn, and none too soon for me.
Bitter blasts unshingle the trees
and scatter the birds - the diminution
to bone branch by gale's tooth.

Ave!  I welcome you, Red Harvester
of yet another year!  I kindle fire
and hold my midnight watch atop a hill."
-   Brett Rutherford, The Grim Reaper

"...for those whose favorite season is autumn with its days of cloudless sky, of spacious 
and clear, far-flung panoramas -- those who view nature with detachment, for whom 
nature's appeal is primarily pictorial, classicists as opposed to romanticists, perhaps. 
On such a day, one is usually excited, physically exhilarated, mentally stimulated.
Only not much is left for the imagination."
-   Charlton Ogburn, Jr.

"After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things.  It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir."  
-    Wallace Stevens,  The Plain Sense of Things, 1952

"October gave a party;
The leaves by hundreds came-
The Chestnuts, Oaks, and Maples,
And leaves of every name.
The Sunshine spread a carpet,
And everything was grand,
Miss Weather led the dancing,
Professor Wind the band."
-   George Cooper, October's Party

"In lantern-light
My yellow
Chrysanthemums
Lost all their color"
-  Buson

"The wild swan hurries hight and noises loud
With white neck peering to the evening clowd.
The weary rooks to distant woods are gone.
With lengths of tail the magpie winnows on
To neighbouring tree, and leaves the distant crow
While small birds nestle in the edge below."
-  John Clare, 1793 - 1864, Autumn Birds

A September to remember.
An October full of splendor.
A November to treasure. 
-  La Prevenchere, Brittany, France, Entertaining Angels

"Back into your garden-beds!
Here come the holidays!
And woe to the golden pumpkin-heads
Attracting too much praise.

Hide behind the hoe, the plow,
Cling fast to the vine!
Those who come to praise you now
Will soon sit down to dine."
-   Grace Cornell Tall, To Pumpkins at Pumpkin Time

"Gardener’s , like everyone else, live second by second and minute by minute.  What we see at one 
particular moment is then and there before us. But there is a second way of seeing.  Seeing with the 
eye of memory, not the eye of our anatomy, calls up days and seasons past and years gone by."
-  Allen Lacy, The Gardener’s Eye, 1992

"The harvest moon has no innocence, like the slim quarter moon
of a spring twilight, nor has it the silver penny brilliance of the 
moon that looks down upon the resorts of summer time.  
Wise, ripe, and portly, like an old Bacchus, 
it waxes night after night."
-    Donald Culross Peattie

"And these memories and associations that our flowers give us are independent
of seasons or of age.  They come to us as well in autumn and winter, in spring
and summer; and as to age, the older we get the more, from the very
nature of things, do these memories increase and multiply."
-   Canon Ellacombe, In a Gloucestershire Garden, 1895

"The last seed
falls from the sunflower--
empty pond.

The long awaited
rattle of rain on rooftops--
Thanksgiving Day."
-  Michael P. Garofalo, Cuttings
                 

"yellow leaves
bright in the afternoon
by the pond"
-  Tanaka, Kimiyo

"A solitary maple on a woodside flames in single scarlet, 
recalls nothing so much as the daughter of a noble house
dressed for a fancy ball, with the whole family gathered
around to admire her before she goes."
-   Henry James

"The autumn always gets me badly, as it breaks into colours. 
I want to go south, where there is no autumn, where the cold 
doesn't crouch over one like a snow-leopard waiting to pounce."
-   D.H. Lawrence, Letters

"The autumn wind!
    The mountain's shadow
    Trembles before it." 
-    Issa, Autumn Wind

"I saw old autumn in the misty morn 
Stand shadowless like silence, listening 
To silence." 
-  Thomas Hood 

"Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled dreams, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave."
-   Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, A Psalm of Life

"a frog floats
face up - 
dead silence."
-   Michael Garofalo, Cuttings

  

"Ho! for the leaves that eddy down,
Crumpled yellow and withered brown,
Hither and yonder and up the street
And trampled under the passing feet;
Swirling, billowing, drifting by,
With a whisper soft and a rustling sigh,
Starting aloft to windy ways,
Telling the coming of bonfire days."
-   Grace Strickler Dawson, Bonfire Days

"Smoke hangs like haze over harvested fields, 
The gold of stubble, the brown of turned earth
And you walk under the red light of fall
The scent of fallen apples, the dust of threshed grain
The sharp, gentle chill of fall.
Here as we move into the shadows of autumn
The night that brings the morning of spring
Come to us, Lord of Harvest
Teach us to be thankful for the gifts you bring us ..."
-  Autumn Equinox Ritual

"Climbing a propped-up ladder, I'm daunted
by the tree's springing and spreading.  Its top-
most, tapering poles are bare; but the sap
still flows along its horizontal limbs
to feed the scale-like leaves, some red, some green."
-   Geoffrey Haresnape, Mulberry in Autumn

"Besides the autumn poets sing,
A few prosaic days
A little this side of the snow
And that side of the haze."
- Emily Dickinson, Nature, XLIX

"You like it under the trees in autumn,
Because everything is half dead.
The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves
And repeats words without menaing."
- Wallace Stevens, The Motive for Metaphor

"Swinging on delicate hinges
the Autumn Leaf
Almost off the stem"
-  Jack Kerouac

"Unnoticed,
the passage has occurred;
as I brood,
autumn dusk
dewdrops fall on my pillow.

The voices of insects
and the deer by the fence,
as one, 
disturb me to tears 
this autumn dusk."
-  Princess Shikishi, High Priestess of Kamo Shrine, 12th Century Japan

"Big brim!  It sloped down and even scraped the ground
And when the wind came, draped over the tops of trees
And an investigator
Trying to peer into his eyes
could see only falling leaves...."
-   Michael Benedikt, Spooky Poems for Halloween

"Through the crisp, swirling launch of our recall
Memories smile at yesterday's replay 
September guides us gently into Fall 
When woods begin to hear chill winter's call." 
-  M. Jo Taylor, Autumn Poems  

"falling leaves
hide the path
so quietly"
-   John Bailey, Autumn Haiku  

"This Halloween night, we cut and eat, 
Fuyu persimmons, firm and sweet.

Plastic skeletons
scattered by pranksters,
resting in pieces.

Nonlocal minds
keeping out of touch,
beyond space and time, 
an eyeless bunch, not saying much.
Mouthless, what can they say?
They can't even pray."
-   Michael Garofalo, Above the Fog

"The morns are meeker than they were,
The nuts are getting brown;
The berry's cheek is plumper,
The rose is out of town.

The maple wears a gayer scarf,
The field a scarlet gown.
Lest I should be old-fashioned,
I'll put a trinket on."
-   Emily Dickinson,  Nature 27 - Autumn

"Autumn arrives, array'd in splendid mein;
Vines, cluster'd full, add to the beauteous scene,
And fruit-trees cloth'd profusely laden, nod,
Complaint bowing to the fertile sod."
-   Farmer's Almanac, 1818

"Leaves drift softly earthward toward the grass
Spring and summer blend from green to gold
And so the seasons come full turn and pass
Day follows day and each of us grows old.

Somewhere there is a bright new shining day
And as these seasons pace and turn
We will live in joy complete and never say
That for younger days our hearts still yearn."
-   Corby Magnuson, The Measure of Leaves

"I am rich today with autumn's gold,
All that my covetous hands can hold;
Frost-painted leaves and goldenrod,
A goldfinch on a milkweed pod,
Huge golden pumpkins in the field
With heaps of corn from a bounteous yield,
Golden apples heavy on the trees
Rivaling those of Hesperides,
Golden rays of balmy sunshine spread
Over all like butter on warm bread;
And the harvest moon will this night unfold
The streams running full of molten gold.
Oh, who could find a dearth of bliss
With autumn glory such as this!"
-   Gladys Harp

"The falling leaves drift by the window
The autumn leaves of red and gold....
I see your lips, the summer kisses
The sunburned hands, I used to hold
Since you went away, the days grow long
And soon I'll hear ol' winter's song.
But I miss you most of all my darling,
When autumn leaves start to fall."
-  Johnny Mercer, lyrics, Autumn Leaves 

"silence
seeks the center
of every tree and rock,
that thing we hold closest-
the end of songs"
-   Michael McClintock, Letters in Time

"Gardening imparts an organic perspective on the passage of time."
-   William Cowper