“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.” This quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has always intrigued me, casting autumn as a season of new beginnings, which has always struck me as paradoxical.
I have a fondness for the golden hues & crispness of this time of year. Although, as I reflected in my last poem Fragments of Stillness, the passing of summer sharpens my awareness of endings – a feeling deepened throughout September. As the leaves begin to fall, I’m struck by the mutability of nature in contrast to the linearity of human existence. Each leaf seems less like a beginning than a reminder of the loose ends that remain.
This year also marks ten years since I saw Bob Dylan perform in autumn, when I was sixteen years old. Among his set, he covered Frank Sinatra’s Autumn Leaves – a delicate, enduring moment that has stayed with me, despite my music taste generally leaning much heavier than Dylan’s. That performance has lingered as a kind of soundtrack to the season’s bittersweet quality.
Shadows of Autumn grew from this mix of literary inspiration, personal reflection, and musical memory – a meditation on the tension between endings and beginnings, and the fragments of ourselves that autumn quietly illuminates.
Shadows of Autumn
Perhaps every autumn is a new beginning -
When life starts over again.
But the way I see it, it’s a new ending -
With every crisp, golden leaf
That falls on dewy grass,
I decide to put to bed
Every undone thing
That I forever resurrect
And scold myself over and over again
In my head.
But how can I separate
Who I am now
From who I was then.
I was older then,
Ungrounded, unfounded then,
I lived my life behind me then.
With bare branches
I can trace every vertebrae of my stubbornness
In the void of inspiration
And piece together
The golden leaves
In a bed of loose ends -
Planted just as much as they are buried,
And will scatter again
Like autumn leaves on the wind -
Casting dappled shadows
Of fleeting endings.
I collect the broken branches,
And I look to the light -
Pressing behind the shadows of autumn.
Logan Darkwoods 