The woods have learned a quieter gold today.
The green still clings, but yields along the bough,
And every leaf that loosens from its stay
Is writing what the year will allow.
A stream goes talking over broken stone,
Clear as a thought the mind has not yet named.
It takes the sky, the leaf, the mossed-out bone
Of one long trunk the last hard wind has claimed.
Low at the bank a wall of gathered rock
Keeps its old covenant with leaf and rain;
The lichens keep their slow and patient clock
Upon each face the weather could not stain.
I stand where summer thins and will not stay,
Where color spends itself before the frost,
And hear, beneath the water’s measured play,
The little losses nothing counts as lost.
The air is not yet sharp, yet something turns,
A hush between the cricket and the crow,
A light that on the yellow maple burns
As if the trees themselves had learned to know
That all this brightness is a kind of prayer,
Not triumph, but a yielding, clean and true:
The orchard’s year of water, fruit, and air
Passing, as all created things must do.
So let the stream keep teaching what it knows,
And let the fallen timber keep its rest.
The verge is holy. What the season shows
Is not an ending only, but a guest,
The One who moves through blossom, branch, and grave,
Who gilds the leaf before He lets it fall,
And walks this yellow corridor, to save
The small, particular beauty of it all.
I turn, a smaller thing beside the brook,
Yet held inside what every autumn gave:
The gold, the stone, the water’s patient look,
And mercy written on the verge of the year.