[Catherine Chandler]

How refreshing not to read about falling leaves, etc. etc.!!! It is SO overdone!

Julie, I absolutely love your light take, and Michael, you truly (IMHO) are the king of the triolet. The one you posted is gorgeous.

As soon as fall comes up here in Quebec, however, my mind is already on the beaches of Punta del Este, where right now it's spring. When winter lasts a good 5 months, there's not much to like about autumn.

[ross hamilton hill]

Read some the lovely work here, especially Michael's poem and I felt inspired. But we don't really have much Autumn or Winter here so the poem I wrote was about its absence and that seemed wide of the mark so I deleted it.

[Julie Steiner]

My daughter reports that her university dorm had an anonymous "fall haiku" contest, and this was voted the winner:

Econ sucks a lot
Goodbye reign in honors coll
It's been a good run

[John Whitworth]

Autumn hereabouts means mud and dirty paws on the carpet.

[Douglas G. Brown]

Originally Posted by John Whitworth

Autumn hereabouts means mud and dirty paws on the carpet.

Autumn hereabouts has no comparison to spring in the mud department. We routinely call early spring "mud season".

[Erik Olson]

I thought to post this poem for the sake of comparison. This is because it exhibits the selfsame tropes that this experiment showed could be effectively eschewed in writing about Autumn.

Autumn

The rusty leaves crunch and crackle,
Blue haze hangs from the dimmed sky,
The fields are matted with sun-tanned stalks —
Wind rushes by.

The last red berries hang from the thorn-tree,
The last red leaves fall to the ground.
Bleakness, through the trees and bushes,
Comes without sound.

~ Joan Mitchell

[Nigel Mace]

Perhaps because I live, as I've always done, in more than one place, this may make my take on the year's rythms a bit different.

It is, however, mine.

XXXXXXXXX

SEASONAL

Which birds go where, I do not know,
I never learned such things,
but as each summer fades I go
pressed by rememberings.

Once more I’m bound by friendship’s round,
where we roved long ago -
and northward far, thole duty’s har,
to clutch for what we owe.

Each season’s change, a transhumance,
makes life a constant flow
and where we choose, and not time’s chance,
makes sense of what I know.

[Andrew Frisardi]

[Sorry, but this was embarrassingly bad.]

[RCL]

Nature Mirrors Man

After Thoreau in “Wild Apples”

Out foraging for apples, windfalls
crabbed and chilled by early frost,
he packs pants pockets with the fruit
and then, when on a saunter home,
he eats from one side, then the other,
by this rotation keeps his balance.

He recalls when nearly home:
a hunting hedgehog rolls over apples,
sticking fruit with its sharp quills,
but if one falls, it shakes off all
to roll again, regaining balance,
before returning to the nest.

[Roger Slater]

FALL TRIOLET

All summer long the trees were bare,
so what was left to fall?
A lurking chill instilled the air
all summer long. The trees were bare.
The birds left early in despair.
The worms forgot to crawl.
All summer long the trees were bare,
so what was left to fall?