The Irondale Larch Light Poem by Gordon R Menzies

In the crisp approaches of Samhain
a frost-laced morning, where auld
red-brushed Jack is lingering yet
in the branches, with his paint pots
and his birch-bark wintery grin
calling wisps of mist at dawn to rise
from the dull tin of old cottage roofs
as if these were an illusion, dissolving
on the road from Dream to Waking
and these autumn fragments drift
before this disbelieving traveler
like your breeze-taken, red-gold hair
on the open riverbank corridor, brisk
so I must touch you sudden, least you
lift and be lost in the larch-light leafsong,
over silver maple carpeting, rusty moss,
the wine-splashed leaf litter, silvered yet
in this fragile October dawn, fleeting
from the furnace falls of Irondale, as
we, like the frost, surrender willingly
our spirits lighter than falling leaves
beneath the last of the years warm suns