Monday's Poetry: "Gathering Leaves"

 

by Pa Rock

Poetry Appreciator

We are well over a month into autumn and closing in on winter.  The leaves around my house are falling steadily and have covered the ground.  It is time for the final mowing of the year to grind the leaves and help to create new soil for next year.

My neighbor doesn't believe in recycling leaves.  He has one of those noisy leaf-blowers that sounds like a chainsaw, and he spends weeks walking around his yard stirring the leaves into big piles with his wind machine - and then he burns them.

But I keep mulching along.  Nature went to a lot of trouble to make those leaves, and who am I to deprive the ground of the compost that She so carefully tried to create?

A century ago New England poet Robert Frost was moving leaves with a spade, putting them in bags, and then storing them in a shed.   Frost regarded his leaves as a "crop" of sorts, and I like that take on it.  This year my leaf crop has been abundant, indeed - and for that I give thanks and roll out the mower for one final trip around the yard.

Gathering Leaves
by Robert Frost

Spades take up leaves
No better than spoons,
And bags full of leaves
Are light as balloons.

I make a great noise
Of rustling all day
Like rabbit and deer
Running away.

But the mountains I raise
Elude my embrace,
Flowing over my arms
And into my face.

I may load and unload
Again and again
Till I fill the whole shed,
And what have I then?

Next to nothing for weight,
And since they grew duller
From contact with earth,
Next to nothing for color.

Next to nothing for use,
But a crop is a crop,
And who’s to say where
The harvest shall stop?