Autumn Light Poem by DePen Chang

Deep autumn is tinted by reddish maple
Adorn gold the wood path
The falling leaves extend time’s carpet
Playing squirrels insisted the blessed midsummer
Resisting time still by the mountain evergreen

The blue sky looks down the Adam River
The white view on the shore
The black look on the shore
The yellow watch on the shore
Four years a life of Salmon rite the life and death in the river
Adam the ancestor of mankind
The salmon’s in Adam river
Either a beginning or an end
The end the beginning as well

The salmon returned with a winding stream against the current
Reddish the scales were on the brink of destruction
Gills the green came the fatigue and melancholy
Male and female pairs off Adam and Eve
Guardian group of new eggs
Waiting for one’s own dying

Final the upside down of the white bellies
Rotten smell astonished amid the white teeth and thick lips of the black
Rotten smell shocked at the green eyes and golden hair of the white
Regret the rancidity covered the mouth and nose in a handkerchief of the yellow

Decompose the life and death on riverbed
Dead and rotten fish floating to nourish the hatched larvae
Old died is fused in new born
The young salmon took the ancestor’s death as the source
Swimming to the Pacific Ocean by the fatal route

Life and death the rite of a salmon in changing hue
Leaves seem to know by changing colors
To mourn maple red and autumn yellow
The so-called beauteous scene
Watching salmon, viewing maple leaves, observing the trees
Maples watch humankind watch woods watch salmon
The blue sky views everything

Hand in hand the people praise the autumn light in maple leaves
Wonder who is the most callous viewer?
Make companion to continue harvesting the apples
Forgot who is the final harvester?