Well on Toward December

A day almost too warm for comfort. Why
the look and sound of fall but not the feel?
The sun lies lazing in the southern sky—
veiled in tissue of cloud ordained to steal
each stretching shadow’s edge: a sight sealing a sigh.

A rustling leaf ballet inflects the light
Along lean birch limbs that will soon be bare,
yellow intensifying the bark’s white.
One branch’s last two leaves hang by a hair.
Two ancient lovers hark to every sound and sight.

Each autumn sees the story being told—
Their story—truer than the year before.
They feel themselves commingled with the gold
now drifting down, less able to ignore,
despite the warmth, the stillness of the impending cold.

The winter is their future; it will come
to them as surely as today it lies
in patience for the fall of the last plum,
claim of the snow; which underneath gray skies,
if not too late, may prove some watchful creature’s crumb.

The Plum Stump

The old plum tree was sawed off near the roots,
some branches in full leaf and others bare,
but not one promising a healthy yield—
a soon to be forgotten entity,
perhaps to be replaced eventually.

The stump looked up, a surface flat and raw,
a witness to the world of damage done,
though futile (being unattended to);
as good as dead, this remnant of the tree,
thought any who knew what it used to be.

The passing months would do the stump no favors.
The sun’s light bleached it to a ghostly pale,
and cracks appeared—the marks of heat and rain
working their weathering way with energy.
The stump slid quietly toward grotesquery.

And as decay inexorably progressed
across this surface, from the bark below
all ‘round the stump a miniature grove
of shoots sprang out, a veritable sea
of life to frustrate death’s hegemony.

Julian D. Woodruff retired from a life as an orchestral musician, teacher, and librarian (art, music). He recently moved from Rochester, NY, to Toronto, where he continues to write fiction and poetry, much of it for children. His poetry is available online at The Society of Classical Poets, Carmina, and Green Silk Journal, as well as Sparks of Calliope. WestWard Quarterly and The Lyric have also published his poetry.