Of Autumn

The month of dull September is approaching its demise, and the dreary time of Autumn is whispering its arrival in every gale. Autumn is the time where everything under the crimson disk of sun is gilded by golden hue. The wearied leaves no longer hold on to their dwellings and flutter and fall to the surface, where, after a few days, they will be interred to the peaceful mounds and will become dust. The larks, the nightingales, and the swallows have flown to trace warmer tracts and left behind them the mouldered and dilapidated nests on the bleached and brown branches. One day, I gathered courage to behold this deserted depiction of nature. Every step of mine cracked the curved corpses of leaves, whose veins and bones were sored to their upper surface and were easy to see. The wind was blowing gently in this still solitude as if she was singing dirges for the dead leaves and flowers, scattered everywhere. Tears gushed from my eyes as I beheld a lone butterfly flitting and fluttering in order to find a sanctuary under a dead flower to heal her broken velvet wings. She laid herself there as if some fairy from heaven was sinking into repose under the bowers__ oblivious of everything around her. The melancholy-freighted gale was whispering something which I could not comprehend. I asked trees,stripped of every colour, what the wind is whispering to them, in the words of Dante Gabriel Rossetti :
Waving whispering trees,
What do you say to the breeze,
And what says the breeze to you ?
I got a reply from wind in a sweet and reedy voice :
‘I am whispering lullabies to these sleeping trees. They are not dead, they are just sleeping,for this is the purpose of autumn: rest and quietude for those who have laboured throughout summer to ensure life for their kind.’
So, after listening to this answer, a mystic rapture creeped in my heart and hope became as firm as the oak. Suddenly, I awoke with strange, luscious joy and mindlessly rushed outside to drink the sweet, immortal air of autumn. Now, autumn was not the dull and dreary time, it was just a time of rest for nature, in order to bounce back its flames of yawning colours in spring. It was all a dream, but a dream more real than reality !