[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.