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Autumn Fades

The orange leaves decay to crinkling gray,
And sunsets sink and fade the clouds to black.
“You’ll see them all in Heaven,” so they say.

The decades start to dwindle, day by day.
Time whips the weary world along its track.
The orange leaves decay to crinkling gray.

Time comes to steal your closest friends away,
And dogs and people die.  They don’t come back.
“You’ll see them all in Heaven,” so they say.

Must all things fly away?  Does nothing stay?
Time pillages and starts a new attack.
The orange leaves decay to crinkling gray.

You weep. They send you off and say to pray.
As though it somehow made up for the lack,
“You’ll see them all in Heaven,” so they say.

Your better times are buried like Pompeii
Or toppled in the Empire’s final sack.
The orange leaves decay to crinkling gray—
“You’ll see them all in Heaven,” so they say.

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First Dealings with Death

The schoolchildren skipped and scampered at play.
One girl stood gravely, gazing down,
Holding out hands, where a hidden thing lay.
I went to see why she wore such a frown.
A fallen pre-fledgling!  She’d found a bird,
Hatched on high, now wholly perished.
She stood like a statue and stared, not a word,
At the bare little bird she blindly cherished.

I stood beside the schoolgirl of five
And mused and mentioned: no more could we do.
She kissed it to cause it to come alive
And wake (for this worked in Snow White, she knew)—
No definite dealings with death before.
She finally stopped fighting its fate: it had died.
When the recess bell rang, she roosted no more;
She buried the bird, said goodbye, walked inside.

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Poet’s note: In addition to being a true story, this poem is in a traditional Anglo-Saxon alliterative form (like Beowulf), but with rhyme added.  There are four strongly stressed syllables per line, the first three of which alliterate with each other and no others in the line.

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Joshua C. Frank works in the field of statistics and lives in the American Heartland.  His poetry has also been published in Snakeskin, The Lyric, Sparks of Calliope, Westward Quarterly, New English Review, and many others, and his short fiction has been published in several journals as well.

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18 Responses

  1. Paul A. Freeman

    Autumn Fades is full of great imagery and extended metaphor. The title is perfect.

    First Dealings with Death felt like a true story even before I read it was. A very difficult form you chose, handled expertly. If I could make one suggestion, how about ‘rued it’ instead of ‘roosted’?

    Thanks for the reads.

    Reply
    • Joshua C. Frank

      Thank you, Paul. I’m glad you enjoyed them. “Roosted” was a deliberate choice, intended to contribute to the image of the little girl as a mother to the bird, but thank you for the suggestion.

      Reply
  2. Roy Eugene Peterson

    These are two notable poems dealing with the specter of death to which we can all relate.

    Reply
    • Joshua C. Frank

      Thank you Roy! I write these poems as a way of dealing with the subject myself.

      Reply
  3. Cynthia Erlandson

    “Autumn Fades” is a beautiful villanelle (and on one of my favorite subjects!) Along with keeping the lovely form, you’ve used some noticeable alliteration and internal rhyme. And I like the three lines that begin with “Time” and give insightful thoughts about some of the things time does.
    In your second poem, the line about Snow White was very moving, as was the whole scene you painted. And I’m glad you included the note explaining the alliterative quality of the poem; I don’t know why I missed that aspect of it on my first reading, but anyway I enjoyed it on second reading.

    Reply
    • Joshua C. Frank

      Thank you, Cynthia. When I was first writing, I was advised to use these techniques whenever possible. It took some effort at first, but now it happens without me thinking about it; I notice it after I’ve already written the line.

      The lines about time were inspired by some lines from Georges Brassens (no attempt at a poetic translation here due to the complexity of the form he used):

      Oh poor love, hold on real tightly
      Time is going to pass you by.
      Time’s a barbarian, unknightly
      As Attila to our eye.

      In all hearts where his horse passes,
      Love won’t grow back (so just don’t try).
      In all four corners of all spaces,
      Where he steps goes desert-dry.

      (“Les Lilas” (“The Lilacs”), my translation)

      With the metaphor of time as a barbarian, I thought, “It really is, isn’t it?” I’ve tried a few times to write a poem with a similar metaphor… that ended up being “Autumn Fades.”

      The second one really happened. The girl loved Disney movies, so I figured she got the idea to kiss the bird from Snow White.

      Reply
  4. Joseph S. Salemi

    The second piece in Anglo-Saxon alliterative meter is interesting, because the four-stress, caesura-split line was perfect for a highly inflected language like Old English. In a language like modern English it doesn’t work as easily, since we depend so heavily on prepositions and articles. But Frank manages the job well, since it is fairly clear where the four stresses fall in each line, and the slight pause is more or less obvious. The triple alliteration is nicely handled.

    Reply
    • Joshua C. Frank

      Thank you Joe! I know you’ve used the form as well. I was inspired by the poems in the journal Forgotten Ground Regained, which specializes in different forms of alliterative verse (I believe you’ve been published there).

      People say it’s more suited to the rhythms of English than iambic, trochaic, etc. meters, and that this makes it easier to write. For me, it’s the opposite. That’s precisely the problem: too much like prose (and that sentence is proof). When each strongly stressed syllable starts with the same sound (there it is again), we don’t notice it because it so often happens naturally in English, so I had to fight the freedom of the form (I wasn’t even trying to alliterate any of these). The real challenge was writing this form without having it fall apart as if I were trying to write free verse.

      I do best when intricate forms impose heavy constraints (hence all the villanelles and shorter meters). That’s one reason I write formal poetry exclusively.

      Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Look at it this way: alliterative Anglo-Saxon verse may be useful as an exercise and an experiment, but would you really want to devote all your creative energy to it? Better to stick with the good old meters that we have now — they’re tried and true, they work well, and people like them.

      Reply
      • Joshua C. Frank

        Yes, well said. I agree that it’s more suited to Old English than modern English.

  5. Isabelle

    Autumn fades is a beautiful villanelle and the perfect form to depict the colourful season of autumn and the inevitable decay that follows.
    The alliteration in First dealings with death is incredibly effective. A tear was brought to my eye. Beautiful! Thank you for your two lovely poems.

    Reply
    • Joshua C. Frank

      Thank you, Isabelle. It’s nice to hear all that about my poems.

      Reply
  6. Brian A. Yapko

    Josh, these are both splendid and accomplished poems on the heaviest of subjects: death. Your poems offer fresh insights on a subject that may be the oldest poetic subject of all. Your villanelle is highly polished and successfully presents an elegiac tone which matches the slow dying of the autumn leaves, your central metaphor. The repetends work really well and achieve a strong conclusionary joining at the end.

    Thank you also for First Dealings with Death — also a very sad poem, but one which succeeds in getting into the head of a small child who is bereft by the death of a small bird. The kiss is a touch which adds real pathos and your word-choice of “roost” is a nice little throwaway. That you crafted this poem in the style of Anglo-Saxon alliterative meter but with rhymes is truly innovative. Your experimentation here is very assured and works quite well. I don’t know if you intended an actual Anglo-Saxon resonance to the piece or if the form simply intrigued you. But I will assume the former since this historic resonance gives the subject-matter of the poem a sense of venerability and timelessness suitable to the grave subject, despite the contemporary elementary school setting. I think you took a real risk here and that it paid off very well. The heaviness of the alliteration in this case could have made the poem seem overly-grave when the subject is a little bird. But instead it elevates the universal theme of the shock and acceptance of death. A longer poem and this might not have worked as well. Your length and pacing are really perfect.

    Reply
    • Joshua C. Frank

      Thank you Brian!

      I wrote “Autumn Fades” because after someone I know (not a believer) announced that his wife died, I thought about how, when someone dies, even believing that Heaven is real provides little comfort in the meantime. After all, I’d miss them just as much if they had moved to parts unknown in Australia, never to return, even though I believe that Australia is a real place. When I became serious about my faith in my twenties, I found that the greatest consolation in those times is not the existence of Heaven; it’s knowing that God is there with you in the valley of the shadow of death, as the psalm says.

      I’ve seen the metaphor of fallen leaves for death quite a bit, at least in French poetry. Jacques Prévert wrote “Les Feuilles Mortes” (“The Fallen Leaves”) and “Chanson des Escargots qui Vont à L’Enterrement” (“Song of Snails Going to the Burial”), to both of which Brassens alluded in his song “Le Vingt-Deux de Septembre” (“The Twenty-Second of September”), where he used the same extended metaphor of autumn. I see my poem as merely an English version of this genre (I haven’t seen it done as much in the English-speaking world for some reason), something these poets might have written if they wrote villanelles (which, ironically, aren’t as popular among French poets!).

      The kiss really happened; there’s no way I could have made that up. This was when I was in my late teens and working with children as part of my high school community service requirement. I make it a policy to write poems about the stories that stay with me years later. To answer your question about my choice of form, I chose it for both reasons. I had tried writing it in different forms, but none suited it. I’m glad this form worked as well as it did!

      Reply
  7. Margaret Coats

    Joshua, your villanelle works well by casting gentle doubt on the notion that everyone and everything will come back in heaven, which is thereby debased to a dream. Funerals have become canonizations. With that unreal heaven in mind, why not offer it to autumn leaves and good times past? Rhyming repetends “crackling gray” and “so they say” serve a purpose tending more toward truth of doctrine and of the human emotion that needs to grieve.

    The story in “First Dealings with Death” is touching. Your acknowledged difficulty with alliterative verse shows, though the topic is certainly one that might be characteristic of Anglo-Saxon poetry. It’s possible that you may be attempting too much in combining alliterative meter with end rhyme. The practice of Old English poets and good translators has a strong caesura as a very important feature, and some of your lines just don’t have one. If you take a look at what they do, you’ll see that their alliteration placement in not as strict as yours. I do like “roosted” as a cute “r” word expressing the would-be motherly feelings of the little girl toward the bird.

    Reply
    • Joshua C. Frank

      Thank you, Margaret. That was well said: “Funerals have become canonizations.” Any Christian worth his salt considers the words of Jesus: “How narrow is the gate, and strait is the way that leadeth to life: and few there are that find it!”

      As for “First Dealings with Death,” I found that it needed rhyme and strict alliteration to flow, and if that made the caesuras weaker, I decided, so be it. In French poetry, as you know, alexandrine lines have a similar caesura, but some poets have been fairly loose with them and still managed to write very good poems by compensating in other areas, such as imagery or the heavy use of rich rhymes.

      Reply
  8. Adam Sedia

    These poems pair well together. The villanelle, with its plaintive refrains, is particularly fit for autumnal subjects. “First Dealings with Death” provides a snapshot of how I think the living always deal with death. You give us a truncated five stages of grief with denial, bargaining, and acceptance, when everyday routine calls us away. The choice of accentual-alliterative verse for this poem was interesting, contrasting its epic origins with the intimacy of the scene — and you managed to make it work with rhyme, which I also found interesting.

    Reply
    • Joshua C. Frank

      Thank you, Adam. I’m glad you found these interesting. You’ve summarized well why I wrote these.

      Reply

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