Autumnal Reflections
Now fades the summer’s scorching flame,
And autumn, with her gentler claim,
Doth steal across the wood and field,
Her rustling banners all revealed.
Where once the sun’s tyrannic blaze
Did smite the meadows with its rays,
Now golden light in softer beams
Pours over earth like quiet dreams.
The leaves, once green in verdant state,
Now fall as Time’s appointed fate,
Like thoughts once bright, now shadowed, pale,
Borne on the cool October gale.
Each branch, stripped bare, its fruit has spent,
Stands testament to life’s lament;
Yet in this loss, a sweetness lies,
For winter’s breath the soul defies.
The air grows sharp, the fields grow bare,
Yet in this thinning earth, a prayer—
For spring will come, and buds will rise,
Though autumn weeps beneath the skies.
Thus, Nature in her circling round
Speaks comfort in her silent sound,
That death, though certain, bears rebirth
And life renews upon the earth.
Ceres in Autumn.
It wasn’t that I didn’t know.
I knew—
when the first cold wind slipped its fingers
through the fields, when the light
turned brittle, like old glass.
I was already mourning,
counting the rows of wheat,
the bushels left unharvested,
the stalks that bent without breaking.
This is the part you always forget:
what’s taken isn’t coming back.
They will say “cycle,”
as if the green will rise again
without a fight,
as if the earth doesn’t bruise
with every frost,
as if I don’t lose something
each time the dark
pulls her under.
I have a name for it, the ache
in the hollow of my chest:
Winter.
Not the season,
but the absence—
the months I am without her,
the empty fields, the silence.
They call me mother,
but a mother cannot hold
what has already turned
to shadow.
Dante’s Descent.
He was always walking,
always in motion toward something
— or away from it.
The streets of Florence,
with their crowded voices and dust,
became too small,
and the world opened before him,
a dark wood.
He could not have known, then,
how far the path would twist,
how deep into the silence of the soul
he’d be driven.
You think it’s about the sins of others,
their torments, their fire and frost,
the nine rings that circle
like the tightening coil of conscience.
But it’s not.
It’s about the wound that never heals,
the exile.
The way he stood on that precipice
and saw, not the damned,
but himself, mirrored in their endless falling.
Beatrice was a name he held like a key,
but there are no keys in Hell,
only doors that open inward,
the way regret turns you inside out.
She became a light,
a distant star—
but stars are cold, and he
was burning with a need
that words couldn’t quench.
Virgil spoke softly,
the way memory does
when it returns to you at night,
familiar but distant.
He led Dante down
because down is the only way
we understand.
We imagine Hell as a pit,
but what if it’s flat, endless—
what if it’s the life we leave behind?
Still, Dante kept walking,
through smoke, through silence,
through the hollowed eyes of those
who never knew their hunger
until they were fed on it forever.
It was not justice he found,
not divine symmetry.
It was loss,
the kind that sharpens with each step,
until even hope is a wound.
When he reached the heart of it—
Satan, frozen in his own ruin—
Dante knew he’d seen himself,
the way a man does
in the coldest moments of night.
The journey was not to ascend,
not to reach some luminous heaven,
but to understand that hell
isn’t where we go.
It’s where we begin.
And still, he walked.
Because beyond the pain, beyond the silence,
there is always another step,
a spiral rising, faintly,
toward a sky
he couldn’t yet imagine.
Things I’ve been loving.
being fabulous as always.This soundtrack and movie are everything!
I’ve been making collages, as well as some paintings …also some badges with I hope to finish in the next hundred years. You can sub to my art account too if you like.
TTFN
LRT
this is stunning ❤️
Gorgeous use of personification in that first poem, Robot!