The Eleventh (sleep of Autumn)

Send us Fan MailThe Eleventh (sleep of Autumn)Warm, Autumn awakes, and throws the blankets of stars off his back, sits with his back to the apple trees, sighs at the falling rain, and looks out at the first of dawn, her fingers stretching the sky, across the morning’s breath of light.He shivers, not that it’s cold, but because of his dreams, the echoes of summer, this passing of days, and his sister, Spring, lost to the earth, sleeping, deeply,by the plough of fields, under roots of trees, beneath the neap of tides, the shadows of rest, imagining colours and blossoms, fertility and fecundities, the giving of seeds, in the joy of life. But she sleeps.He stretches and stands, the wind blusters about him, the fire of leaves rise and flurry, in dull, in damp, in the dust of early morning grey, and then settle again about his feet, a heaped pile of memories and moments to bury deep, then bury deeper until the month of May. He yawns, the wind again,stirs and tarries in the empty canopies of the thinning darkness, the silhouetted branches, the burning fires  and twigs of the solitary souls of trees, ‘Enough,’ he shouts, in a roar of gales and rage,  and rips his hands through clouds, the last of stars and a stubborn morning sky, the earth tilts and trembles, he thrashes and turns expanding,exhaling into the first of the November wrath of winter storms, rain and hail, gusts and drops of heavy fragments of an already empty sky. The Earth spins.Suddenly and depleted, he collapses and falls in mists and shrouds, slipping into frost and silence, the shattered puddles iced and cold,over his head, he lies, dead and frozen across the huddled darkness of dull November and the last struggling hands of dawn and morning [email protected]