Fallen Leaves

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Fallen Leaves

By Jane Tawel

October 3, 2025

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Falling leaves…

How we complain

The work to gather them

with rake or glove- ed hands.

Why not let them lie in peace?

And let the winter storms

cover or disperse them, as they will?

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I remember times of joy

in making piles of leaves.

When the boy and girl

would come and mess the piles

by jumping into mountains

flattening them to plains

that tiny hands and feet could tread with ease.

I remember times of laugher,

as all my gathered, hard-worked piles

would be the brightly colored ammunition

of flinging, flying, softly crackling leaves.

What an arsenal of happy thoughts,

could be a pile of leaves.

We held the leaves like fluttering birds

No longer leaves imprisoned in a cage of tree or bin,

But free in flight with new-grown wings,

The leaves no longer fallen, but redeemed.

*

A single leaf alone, left on a tree,

is much a lonely thing that clings,

to what is past and can not grow

until it dies to rise again, mysteriously in Spring.

But fallen leaves tell all our ends.

And myths are made from simple things.

We all shall fall

and soon decay — 

But ah! — to use my final days

in being gathered, gathered, gathered up,

with all the small, soft-colored things

by Hands that fling me towards the sky

Where flying up — I find I am no longer just one leaf,

But something beautiful with wings.

© Jane Tawel, 2025