Sunset In Autumn

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Blood-coloured oaks, that stand against a sky of gold and brass;
  Gaunt slopes, on which the bleak leaves glow of brier and sassafras,
  And broom-sedge strips of smoky pink and pearl-gray clumps of grass,
  In which, beneath the ragged sky, the rain-pools gleam like glass.

  From West to East, from wood to wood, along the forest-side,
  The winds,--the sowers of the LORD,--with thunderous footsteps stride;
  Their stormy hands rain acorns down; and mad leaves, wildly dyed,
  Like tatters of their rushing cloaks, stream round them far and wide.

  The frail leaf-cricket in the weeds rings a faint fairy bell;
  And like a torch of phantom ray the milkweed's windy shell
  Glimmers; while wrapped in withered dreams, the wet autumnal smell
  Of loam and leaf, like some sad ghost, steals over field and dell.

  The oaks against a copper sky--o'er which, like some black lake
  Of DIS, dark clouds, like surges fringed with sullen fire, break--
  Loom sombre as Doom's citadel above the vales, that make
  A pathway to a land of mist the moon's pale feet shall take.

  Now, dyed with burning carbuncle, a Limbo-litten pane,
  Within its wall of storm, the West opens to hill and plain,
  On which the wild geese ink themselves, a far triangled train;
  And then the shuttering clouds close down--and night is here again.

© Madison Julius Cawein