September Song

 

Yesterday's cool forest interior with its brisk

wind swaying tree tops sodden with rain is

gone, and today's unseasonable warmth is

complemented by a balmy breeze still

emphatic enough to send little helicopter

seeds drifting from maples already turning

foliage from green to bright red. Scattered

on the forest floor under lofty spruces are

their cones, some green and gummy others

scraped apart by the clever handling of

squirrels looting their seeds. It is, after all

nature persuading summer that its time has

elapsed, to make space for the entry of fall.

Fall asters signal their willingness to bloom

last of the wildflowers when all others have

departed. In the natural order of seasonal

vegetation in the confines of an unspoiled

forest landscape wildflowers rule in spring

and summer until the wild soft berries are

ripe on shrubs and trees, all offering solace

to birds and beasts whose haven is the forest.

Final stage of summer features new entrants

to the annual showpiece of the forest landscape

as fungi thrust through the moist fecund leaf

mass to claimtheir space and time in a wide 

array of shapesand colours as numerous and 

varied as the flowers whose presence they are 

prepared to replace. A fluid transition the 

choreographer of themasterpiece theatre has 

adeptly and professionally synchronized and

manipulated to the final perfected degree.