Black Autumn { For My Silent Mentor Edgar Allan Poe}...

Comes the cold, black, Death of Autumn,
harbouring its’ pique on naked limb;
stirring damp, feral winds
to the hawking, stalking,
insidious squawking…
of ominous, petulant birds,
large, pestilent birds,
inexorabally, ever circling
‘neath the late day shadows
from a cold november sun.

Come the crows, their angry eyes… beating,
the kind you felt breathing o’er your neck
the first time you read, ‘The Raven’.
Teasing breeze-spun tumbleweeds,
rolling over dry cornfields… spewing-
threads and shard of stems and husk,
gaunt signs of a harvest dying.
Clouds bleed deepest sage, and drape
over tense foreboding presence –
of dark-winged beasts in flock,
fecklessly searching
hopelessly lurching
for any cynical signs
that autumn had not yet abandoned them.

Dark and black, blackest black,
hovering o’er the last man…
standing,
in this smoke-dusted cornfield,
stoic……and statuesque,
donned in spirited plaid,
its cloth, nor’easternly tattered;
with colors fading as fast
as the final stages of autumntide.

He is guardian of the Harvest,
protector of the field,
intrepidly perched
over a cornucopia
of Autumns end-stage.

And so hangs the Scarecrow
upon six feet of wood,
weathered, yet sturdy,
strapped high in pose –
arm-limbs out-stretched
resembling crucifixion.

Comes the taunting of the beasts,
their harsh kick of wing-gust
as each crow finds its place,
precision arrow flanked,
with bitter sense and arrogance,
playing to the wind,
grieving on the Death-
Death of the Harvest,
their Autumn fast slipping
fast slipping…slipping away;
to the smirk of winters spite
spread in wafts of early frost,
Autumns ‘crystal-meth’!

And, the Crows, ever bastards
take their angst to the Strawman
obsessively circling, compulsively swooping
drooping, looping by night-
their black eyes stab like dart-tips….so piercing.

Thus, the Strawman succumbs
to a wind-flounced dance, and-
to the evil delight of its menacing prey,
while winds southward concert
a choir of pitched soprano
like fifes on air,
tipping the tree-tops
with ranged whistle and echo.

Comes Autumns colourless Death,
bare, brittle…a woeful Death.
No eulogy be choired here-
as Winters crypt seals itself
assuring Autumns air hath passed-
away on Mother Natures watch –
ostensibly over night.

And the Crows, cold and jaded,
fly away as same they came
wreaking havoc south of cottonland,
’till the April month
when melting ice
rears verved buds
on verdant limbs
of a Spring awaiting birth and breath,
and Renaissance
When they come…once again,
……………………they always do.