Cast your leaves, trees unfettered
autumnal colors inked with a crow—
like my heart it's wing beats go
and leave me but just one feather.

These winds will do as a parting kiss,
but don't cast down a shadow gloom.
For you bring back the flower bloom
and you'll come with to reminisce.

Keep in mind, my jet black heart:
You are not just subject to the storm,
you're wing and wit, Olympus born
and our embers always kindle to a fire start.

I would paint every color of every moment of the sky.
Each sunrise and sunset - each glistening moon.
But I'd never recapture the shine of your eye.
And I'll never not say: "You died far too soon."

Who'll keep me warm, when you are gone?
After snowfall,
who'll sing the mornings sweet songs?
At the end of it all,
when all's said and done, will we still get along?

The hardest time might not be all the frost.
Maybe it's our autumns,
to swallow our pride and sit inside with our loss,
waiting for blossoms.
But we've to plant them ourselves when uprooting dross.

And the birds will come home, at long last, to nest,
and flowers will bloom,
while I sit and I wait, heart longing for rest -
that can't come without you.

Your cloud-soft lifts may smile and part
to make you now, the thief of hearts -
as mine beats faster by fits and starts.

But to miss a moment of your grace
even for sleep's coddled embrace
is a cut from my heartbeat of sad disgrace.

The sun still shines through the cold
and I still wear myself to the bone,
for iron and steel can rend my flesh
but in the end it will bend at my behest.

Such a height to fall from grace —
O pray and hope but don't cry, child
your once-soft hands will tame these wilds,
as your arrow will find it's place.

Each moon glows with the hum of home
as the lone fire sings back with crackled hum.
A heroes journey is about who they become
and the paths they pave from once unroamed.

Carried on the wings of a bird too frail to have left the nest
you fell to the roots of a grand maple that was clinging to a thread.
As it collapsed, branches and leaves falling, you exclaimed,
"I, too, rise above the world around me, reaching such heights."
But you failed to notice that it was just the world falling apart.
And like the bird that bore you, you, too, will not survive the frost.