Looking at the Onset

1 Golden
Earth dances with the sun, tilting and spinning. These two old lovers anticipate and execute intricate footwork. I am left to marvel and wonder at the choreographer. All the while, I enjoy the golden hour when nature glows.

2 Green
The geese gobble grass and paint the concrete green. A chlorophyll pigment in an abstract expression. They strut as proud artists while I question their motivation. Every day I watch the green fade as rains wash it away.

3 Orange
The fields are pregnant with produce and abundance. The orange bellies of squash and pumpkins rise. Soon there will be a birthing from field to porch. Offspring of summer sun and fall rains take an evil turn as they grin.

4 Red
The bonfire roars with heat and tongues of red. Swallowing all that is offered, ravenous for twigs and husks. My skin flushes red as I huddle close to escape the cold night. Turning away my nose is nipped red by night chill.

5 Brown
Tilting away from the sun, she dances in summer’s twilight. A striptease of leaves green and gold flung to the ground. Her body chaffed red in the wind as warmth fades to brown. I watch the world turn inward away from winter.

Edit! I was in such a rush to get this posted before I had to be at work that I completely forgot to link it to the We’ave written Weekly poetry prompt and to David’s blog at the Skeptic’s Kaddish. This week’s Poet of the Week, Sylvia Cognac, challenged us to write a Cadralor about anything related to Autumn that is important to you…

This is a Cadralor poem which is defined as a poem of 5, unrelated, numbered stanzaic images, each of which can stand alone as a poem, is fewer than 10 lines, and ideally constrains all stanzas to the same number of lines. Imagery is crucial to Cadralor – each stanza should be a whole, imagist poem, almost like a scene from a film, or a photograph. The fifth stanza pulls the unrelated stanzas together into a love poem. Which means that the fifth stanza illuminates a thread that runs obliquely through the unrelated stanzas and answers the compelling question: “For what do you yearn?” It is the poet’s discretion to decide how much contextual connection or linguistic connection will exist between the stanzas. The more unrelated in context, the sharper and riskier the poem. Ultimately, the more unrelated the stanzas, the more successful the poem will be as a Cadralor because they contain oblique connections that are illuminated by the fifth stanza. End punctuation between stanzas is also at the discretion of the poet.