Requiem for Fall

The season of new beginnings.
Spring gets too much credit for new life.
The truth (that only a few people know) is
We live best when everything else is dying:
We’re selfish (not you and me, I mean the species)—
The earth brings forth her bounty that she’s slaved over for eons, really,
And we gobble it up with the Thanksgiving Turkey.
We start school years and cycles and runways off when the earth has been deprived of her loves, the leaves,
And the earth looks at our selfishness and says, “no more.”
And then winter and bleakness and chill.
Nothing grows because we have done nothing to deserve it,
Just take and take and take.
But every year in the spring She relents,
Starts to thaw,
Forgives us, her children,
And (I suppose) that is not a new beginning,
But an old one.
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