Writing Resources from Fifteen Minutes of Fiction

October

I had a fist full of sunbeams that warmed my hand
and now they seep out and plummet like dying birds
into a past that will never quite repeat.
My center, the very middle of me is chilled;
the worm of winter has found its existence there,
quiet and still until this moment, this October,
this prelude to a future of white and cold.
It is not a presence but an absence -
softly draining away life as it slowly expires.

October, if you have a beauty of your own
it is hard to see, for everywhere you noiselessly proclaim
and point and sneer in one irreversible direction.
On every path you roll out the carpet for one thing,
and mask your foliage with an eerie chill.
You are little more than a freshly-painted shroud,
and your bright colors are a looming sunset,
a funeral for that which existed only long enough
to watch you usher it perpetually toward winter.

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