October Gold
When I walked out this morning it felt like spring. Two traveling birds sang to one another among the golden and rust colored leaves on two oak trees in our yard and that of our neighbor. Other birds hopped about. One was attracted to the bright orange berries in a prickly shrub in front of our house.
There isn’t much mention of leaves in the bible. In the Garden of Eden the “Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food.” I have always thought of “good for food” for us humans. But the orange berries on the prickly shrub and the miniature red fruit on the flowering crab in our front yard are not for human consumption.
The only mention of gold leaves is in Exodus 39:3 in connection with the making of the priests’ ephod. “They hammered out gold leaf.” This is a little difficult to apply to fall colors, unless one imagines God hammering out the chlorophyll.
A better image is contained in Carl Sandburg’s poem “October Paint” in which he see someone with an October paint pot paiting over the summer green.
We had a light frost on the ground Sunday morning. We were told that the leaves wouldn’t be as bright this year. But around our neighborhood the yellows are standing out with the reds confined to the Burning Bushes and other smaller shrubs.
Sandburg also wrote a poem that describes our October day, today.
Haze Gold
Sun, you may send your haze gold
Filling the fall afternoon
With a flimmer of many gold feathers.
Leaves, you may linger in the fall sunset
Like late lingering butterflies before frost.
Treetops, you may sift the sunset cross-lights
Spreading a loose checkerwork of gold and shadow,
Winter comes soon-shall we save this, lay it by,
Keep all we can of these gold yellows?
Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, Harcourt and Brace, 1950.
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