Why are my poems so obsessed with doom?
Is there no light their dark will not consume,
no work they will not turn into a chore,
nor child they cannot drown in metaphor?
Sometimes beauty is neither fraud nor thief;
sometimes a leaf is just a common leaf—
a welcome shade from the summer heat
where we can sip a glass of something sweet
and watch the sun setting behind the blackberries.
These colors will be remembered by the trees:
the gold and orange, the blood and plum and black.
Memories of these nights will echo back
in a few short months when the leaves grow old
and relive their warmth as the wind grows cold.