Heretical Gravity
Written for “Autumn’s Breath” — Regina Mcintosh
18 August 2026
—Autumn Reverses the World—
The streams, insurgent against gravity, ascend
The hills, as though the sea reclaimed the blue it lent;
The roots, abjuring their chthonic covenant, climb
Through loam towards empyrean immensities beyond time;
The leaves, renouncing their ordained descent, return
To boughs, as though departure were a wound the trees unlearn;
The orchard, having spent its aureate inheritance, distils
From severance a green no summer’s plenitude fulfils;
At dusk, the firmament dilates beyond the visible sphere,
Whilst shadows, severed from their bodies, migrate where
No geography survives the sovereignty of light;
And frost, beneath the rose, engenders a subterranean night;
A seed, still unborn, remembers what birth has yet to know,
And thrusts its darkness skyward, making earth overflow;
Then Time, divested of its forward-moving throne,
recoils through every fallen leaf towards the future it disowned;
I breathe—and autumn enters not my lungs, but the place
Where being precedes its name, and becoming outlives its trace;
For Autumn does not breathe the dying year into its end—
It breathes the unborn through all we call the dead.
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