AUTUMN ARGUMENT

by Lorna Knowles Blake

You would wake each day of the year
in leaf season, a permanent
blaze of foliage resistant
to gravity, rainstorm, wind-shear.

Not for you the promiscuous
fields of summer—endless green, green,
green: nor spring waiting unseen
in the mud, full of amorous

rebirth; and not the ashen pall
of winter. You would freeze your grove
in flames, but I tell you—we love
the autumn leaves because they fall.