Autumn's Last Leaf

Before the biting arctic wind autumn's last leaf helplessly clings. Other leaves, less tenacious lie wet and matted beneath the season's first snowfall. Nothing shows of summer's pointillistic canvas save the occasional fir tree and bramble. Winter's pen and ink simplicity waxes gray and white to show the landscape's ebb and flow in chiaroscuro light. In the cold of winter the luckless suffer the impatient perish, yet here and there the tracks of bird and rabbit show how life goes on. If autumn's last leaf were to weather wind and ice and snow and feel again the tepid balm of April-spring, it would surely come to naught for nothing dead can cling before the swelling of a tender bud.