What Once was Green is Gone

The leaves fall, and what once was green is gone. These brown and rotting corpses litter the ground, every crunch a reminder of what used to be.

A world alive and innocent, unhaunted by Winter, untouched by the cold hand that plucks life from the earth. The last of the past falls like these leaves, and with it a simpler season. The revolution ushers in a new world, darker and chilled, hiding monsters behind barren branches.

This place is different now. Scarier. The light leaves sooner than before, and I get lost on my walk home sometimes. It has dimmed my eyes and though I try, I can’t unsee the dark.

The trees may live again some day, but never in the same shade of green. The wind has stripped their now naked skeletons, revealing the bends and broken limbs from falls I’ve never felt until now. I fear there’s no going back.

Across the lawn, across this yard of graves, a man holds a rake. He pushes the past along the ground, humming a lament to the home he once sowed. I can tell he feels it, too. The sky fell, and he is left sweeping the pieces.

He piles the leaves to be burned and then leaves them waiting, disappearing into the house. Like me, I wonder if he can’t bear to say goodbye. What loss and love and loneliness hide in those leaves?

When he reemerges, I’m surprised to see the hand of a boy replaces the rake. He leads his son to the pile and they pay their last respects, knowing they can never go back to how things were. They stand for a short while, talking and reminiscing, I’m sure. They walk away hand in hand, the burden of the deceased too great for them to dwell in for long.

But then, like the earth reversing its orbit, they stop and turn. And all at once, they run. With laughter on their lips, they leap into the leaves, the heaping grave of a sweeter season crushed by the weight of a heavy joy. They wrestle and tickle at the funeral of things gone by. The pain of loss is their play. 

Oh, God, let me play, too. I want to jump, but I need a hand to lead me.