By Dr. Allen Culpepper, Associate Professor of English
October now: the weather holds clear as in
summer, though skies burn a drier blue
that deepens with the evening nip to thrill,
as autumnal sorrow’s bright, cold blade
enters clean, but when withdrawn tears flesh
of memory from its secret buried vault
and leaves it strewn across the backyard path,
where frost will make it glisten just at dawn;
the morning’s first chill breezes stir the branches
of the last remaining tree, an elm,
and it drops its final golden leaf.