Nightfall, Another November

Painting by Beth Edwards

Nightfall, Another November


I stepped outside at 5:00 and another November struck me
like a black bolt of ash -- the darkness of early sundown,
the steely chill of snow-threatening clouds,
and a near-deafening din that drowned out the wind.
The colors of October long ago disappeared,
fallen to the ankles of once brightly outfitted trees
that stood as beacons for weekend leaf peepers.

They now reached skyward in scraggly stick-'em-up
posture, robbed of their raiment
by frost and frigid currents. Shivering sentinels,
the skeleton maples, hickories and oaks,
found their bony limbs decorated by hundreds of
nattering neighbors in jet, keeping with
the dark end of the month’s gray-scale color scheme.

Advent ornaments, lit by sundown, shiny and black,
adorned the branches. Ebony leaves full of cawing cacophony.
At dawn, these gravity-defying decorations disappear,
falling up and away, shed in an anti-autumn explosion
of feathers, noise, and bad intent,
onyx scavengers crowing their ascendancy
over a napping Nature.

And I feel the bones of another of my years
about to be picked clean.


Joe Hesch

Posted over on his site A Thing For Words
Listed as #9 over on dVerse Poets--Open Link Night