The last leaf just fell on me
Did you see it?
It was yellow and cheeky
Crept up on me behind my back and swooped over my shoulder

There will be no more leaves this year that's it
No more colour for us to see
Roll on Spring
Roll on colour

Meet me among the numbing fields
where the cream narcissus grows.

Where my desperate human voice sings
against the flow of the autumn winds.

Do you hear the pillars of my empathy crumbling?

The wicked Imbolc has passed,
leaving me naked and sick in the light
of longer days.

Yellow-trumpeted blooms of each joss flower
are caught swaying to the emptying sounds
of my apathy.

Where I have been patiently waiting for
the flowering blood of hyacinth.

you're my sunflower,
more so than her,
you bloom with beaming pride,
your petals reflect the tide,
your heart bright yellow,
dancing in the meadow.

-lilac

Let October’s fool fall
With the autumn dusk;
A cornfield tatterdemalion
With terrible teeth
And broomstick hands.
High on the hill,
Encircled by dancing children
And harvest lovers,
Jack’s pumpkin blazes
As yellow as prairie gold
Under the ghostly lantern moon.

The earth is black
on both sides.
The yellow bus
taking the living away
passes pile after pile
of rubble, of signs that
were once there:
the Harley Davidson store,
The Rogue Action Center-
a nonprofit climate change group,
the community bank -
it’s vault the only thing standing.
Indistinguishable from the ash
is the mobile home park,
which once housed the migrants
that harvested the town’s fabled pears.
Only their metal survived the wildfires:
aluminum lawn chairs, a barbecue pit,
hubcaps of cars long since evacuated.
Among the stranded survivors
is the aged widower searching
impossibly for his wife’s ashes.
He had escaped and settled
here after the Paradise fires took
his previous home two years back.
Crows on charred oaks branches
watched and mock his effort.
He looked all around him
and wondered to God
if he had paid
enough grief dues.
When the bus stopped for him
he did not get on.