Autumn

We all gather round you,

precious egg.

Cocooning you in blankets,

concealing untold pain and suffering.

You are fragile and beautiful

like an old-time song half-heard through a closed door,

or the final petal to fall from a rose.

You lie there, so small and so still,

with veins that rise up in rivers of silver,

trickling through tissue-paper skin.

Oblivious to the passing of time and the change of season,

each passing hour brings you closer to the end of another day.                   And then night is here again,

finally releasing you to that calmness which comes

just after the moon casts its ashen light 

and before those hours 

when the sky is a drowsy, dusky pink.

I saw the leaves change colours today.

I suppose that autumn is here.