We piled them in barrows, body on body, and carted them to the pit. We lifted them into the ashes of their kin, and my youngest scattered ragged remnants across the lawn.
When we lit them
their skins crackled and split,
smelling sweetly of
of earth and age
and releasing their souls
in wisps and wavers
into a welcoming sky.
I raked the remains together long past the time my children left me, savoring the work and wellness of putting things to bed, all the more so in November against banks of bloody trees and stony sky.
All along they were
breaking, each bud
crowning into the bright
daylight of a new spring,
emerging from treetops like
feathers pluming out of caps,
green against the golden
halls of April.
In the woods on the longest day,
July sky filtered through
keyholes of clotted
maples, and the life of it all felt
nearer than skin, stretching
overhead and within me, a
pressing down and running over,
quiet like a memory. And now,
reverie at the heights of autumn
strips all the green away
to reveal the blood beneath.
Up on the old oak, the last leaf trembles,
vivid as a final garment sliding free,
wavering in shy silence,
xylans blushing at the
yearning caress of winter, the
zenith loveliest at the laying down.
It’s been a brisk, clear-blue-sky kind of day here in Indiana – the perfect start to autumn.
Of all seasons, autumn is by far my favorite. Though I love the changes – the reminder I need that every day is another day closer to Christ coming back and making everything right – autumn somehow captures my heart. It stirs me up. It’s bracing and invigorating, full of the weight of harvest and the impending weight of winter snapping at its heels.
It’s also the final season in my book SOLACE, and the one that somehow comes to terms with so many of the things the other seasons have wrestled with.
Autumn is a complex season. It signals the returning power of freezing temperatures, darkening days, and the death of living things, while celebrating the joy and abundance of harvest in a riot of gorgeous color. It is preparation – for sleep, for hibernation, for the long dark days of winter. But the preparation is exciting. It’s laying down root vegetables and winterizing pipes and raking leaves into fire pits and making cider.
I find autumn to be the natural capstone to the overarching narrative of SOLACE. The book begins in darkness and encounters it often, and it finds light and grace and goodness in unexpected places. But in the end, the cycle will return to the dark and cold of winter. I know this. I know this about my own life – that darkness will go away for a while, and then return. Perhaps it will be lighter this next time, perhaps darker. Perhaps it will be shorter, or longer. Either way, it’s as sure to me as the hope I hold that more darkness lies ahead.
But autumn is stacking firewood inside the mudroom door, so that throughout the winter we can keep the fire going. It’s carrying bushels of the harvest in so we can feast well. It’s cellaring joy and stockpiling grace and preserving patience for the long winter ahead.
And that, my friends, is an invigorating, hope-filled thing to be a part of. Death is coming, but it will not find us unprepared.
The songs contained in this final playlist for SOLACE, poem for poem, match autumn words with autumn tones. And because I just couldn’t choose between the two songs I wanted to use to end the book, I kept them both.
chicago in season iv / Pulaski at Night (Andrew Bird) familiars / Slack Jaw (Sylvan Esso) through fathoms / Autumnal (Teen Daze) blanks / Shatter (BAYNK, Martin Luke Brown) US-20 in october / Big Smoke (Tash Sultana) bleeding in, bleeding out / Humble Heart (Jess Ray) suspension lament / Maranatha (Jackie Hill Perry) ode to autumn / The Fall (Ben Shive) but now i see / Explaining Jesus (Jordy Searcy) bon-fire / Dream State (Son Lux) crowns / Virile (Moses Sumney) perhaps the sea / Dissolve Me (Alt-J) wanton / Just and Just As (Penny and Sparrow) and there will come a time / Be Kind To Yourself (Andrew Peterson) burn on steady / Lift a Sail (Yellowcard) bonus track / Into the Darkness (Drew Miller)
