uncommons

In a mellow eulogy to Alec Soth’s former blog please come back!, here’s a poem that adheres to yesterday’s posted photograph of leaves drifting silently along a creek. It was taken while on assignment about conservation in the Mark Twain National Forest outside Columbia, Mo. Look for more poems the longer his blog remains silent.

Aftermath
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

When the summer fields are mown,
When the birds are fledged and flown,
And the dry leaves strew the path;
With the falling of the snow,
With the cawing of the crow,
Once again the fields we mow
And gather in the aftermath.
Not the sweet, new grass with flowers
Is this harvesting of ours;
Not the upland clover bloom;
But the rowen mixed with weeds,
Tangled tufts from marsh and meads,
Where the poppy drops its seeds
In the silence and the gloom.