Poetry Forum

Come autumn, you’ll miss me
in the birch leaves falling,
bleeding their branches
before the snow
and untangling
from the arms of your lover
you’ll make me of moonlight
from the long ago,
though the night be a blackness, and the slant rain stinging,
or frost makes the forest hardwoods splinter.
If we meet, it will be summer again,
if not ... winter,
though windflowers bloom in the wild women's singing



The link to the original thread is here

Excellent suggestion. I always loved this poem.

Thanks! This made my day!

A beautiful piece, Achebe. Congratulations.

The more I read it out loud, the more of it's beauty I hear.

This will be one I'll commit to memory.

Well done, Achebe, this is lovely. congratulations!

-Quix.

good choice todd;

worthy of more than one read.

Achebe, it's an excellent poem. I've very much enjoyed reading it.

lovely! it's this sort of quiet lyricism with sorta archetypal* natural-pictures that i love reading and writing -- my two nits perhaps are with line nine, in that its commas are maybe too much and the tense of "stinging" i feel is incorrect, and with the last line, in that it seems to have unnecessarily forgotten a period. the passage of "if not... winter" i love, that and the sudden changes in sonics introduced by line 8 really give it a sense of tangling-untangling. i do prefer some of your other stuff, particularly impossible angel and the flower of youth, but i think that's more because their subjects are closer to my heart than anything else, this reads clearer, with the sounds tied better to the themes. again, lovely, lovely, lovely work!

* -- at least for temperate, or even just western, countries, which sorta makes me uncomfortable in my reveling in it. though how is this footnote relevant to the discussion again?