Rhapsody of Leaves

Throughout your fifteenth year,
you dreamed
each house a fold
in concertina streets of city
and wished for the wind
that would make every twist
of road croon
in urban song.

By your sixteenth Autumn
you'd had three months
of lifting misshaped biscuits
out of a conveyor belt
workplace and life
so as the year yellowed,
you saw ridges of leaves
as corrugated iron,
trees bronzed by shafts
of sun as rusting metal.

Reviews

[Pema Dorje]

metaphor is your plaything here and the Song of Autumn becoming the gears of the machine is brilliant ... and a sad homage to the loss of innocence... yet the writer writes to shape the world in which she writes, and nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so ... Raja Yoga: I become what I think about all the time; if I think of biscuits I become biscuit like, if I think of Music so Music moves the world... and so I write to think in Joy and laugh at all the things I've forgotten in that darker day ... a wondrous and beautiful write Sel!

[Joiedevivre]

Absolutely adore the imagery in the first stanza and the next one really brought back times when I was studying mathematics and wound up seeing the whole world in its language.
excellent!

[Collect-Eye]

this poem sort of matches my glasses

[Ed Hart]

yes, you grew up some back then, but i'll bet you're more grown up now...you have to be or you couldn't tell us about it so well...

[PianoandPage]

amazing. i love the 2 stanza format... how the passage of one year changes your outlook and perspective... things remain poetic and yet the metaphors themselves are affected by the workplace, the mundane. so well written. you have such talent.

"year yellows" - that line kills me!!

wonder wonderful read.

[[untitled]]

A particularly nice phrase ... wished for the wind. This is a lovely piece of prose. Very nicely written.
Best wishes, Bethlynne.

[Spoken]

It leaves me wanting to know more. Lovely imagery and use words

so as the year yellowed

trees bronzed by shafts of sun
as rusting metal

the concept of a season intertwinning with a machine, work and life mixing, beautifully done.

[Nan]

I thnk I just saw a biscuit tree! I see how the images overlap and give this
piece its sense of form. And the job, I can only believe that your imagination
began to soar from the boredom. Or at least from the character's perspective
one would believe to become creative as a great way of escaping boredom.

I like how this connects the man-made and natural worlds. thanks for sharing,

Nan

[Blackbirdsong]

There is a timelessness to this writing that makes me wish you'd add more years to it. Not that it needs more, but you really captured me and I want more. Greedy to the last here.

I love the mix of you working in a biscuit factory with the lovely views of Autumn, the back and forth from beatiful to mundane is hypnotic.

[W.k.kortas]

Ken is spot-on here; really, the two stanzas are two sides of an equation. The play of nature in the first stanza cf. the man-made in the second is wonderfully done, and the imagery is just top-shelf. This is first-rank, professional-quality writing.

[Ken Simm.]

Superb dichotomy Ken