Kiss each autumnal day;
Savor it.
Feel it's cold raw breath on your chapped lips,
It's windy embrace tangling your hair and
Twining around your fingers,
Begging you to stay and twirl and dance
In a field of dying grass;
Taste it, like ginger and peppermint tea
Left sitting on the edge of the worn wooden steps
Overnight, gathering the taste of frost and moist earth
And the peculiar scent of red-yellow leaves
With their brown edges rotting away into nothing;
Sense it, like the geese and the blackbirds
Just know to be carried away to warmer air,
Like the small animals just know that it's time
To stay deep underground, buried beneath the
Soft white blankets of snow;
See it in the skeleton branches and
Damp yellowish grass and iron grey clouds,
Watch the trees drop their leaves
And the crows sit like silhouettes in the tops of the oaks;
Hear it in the soft breezes and cold, whistling winds and
Dry, rustling grass and shrill birds, trying to find warmth;
And taste and smell and feel and hear and sense and savor
The grey-silver rain that drops from the heavy-bellied,
Purple bruised clouds and breaks against your chilled skin
And dews in sparkling diamonds on your eyelashes
And slips between trembling lips and
Runs in streams and rivulets down your spine and into the
Hollow of your neck and across your wrists and in
Little waterfalls from your fingers and chin and nose
As it washes away the stains and scars of life
And rinses your mind clear and focused and
You open your eyes and through the
Blurry sheets of rain, the street lights are dimmed and
The ground glistens and the only sound is the
Drumming of raindrops and the
Thrumming of life in your soul.