(Written with appreciation for
Robert Frost’s “My November Guest”)

How is it that gloomy Autumn murk
is as passing lovely as a Summer’s day
when sunlight fails and shadows lurk
and rainclouds dim each reaching ray?

Fall is always weeping, even when not,
while yesterday’s tears drip from eaves
and color drains from a reverie of rot—
the huddling memories of fallen leaves.

The gray barrenness is a thing akin
to mourners crowding a funeral home,
peopling absence around a silent coffin
from which the spirit has gone to roam.

And grief has a beauty all its own,
being an atmosphere of misty tears,
a season when we’re among many, yet alone,
plunged deep in phantoms from previous years.

It is overcast with a private veil,
the ambience of our greatest grief
a season of solitude, languishing and pale
like the sun seen through a torn diary leaf.

Autumn is the season of loss and pity,
moody and umbral like the brokenhearted,
but its dirge refrains with a line of dignity—
“Remember to remember the departed.”