Sheaves in Autumn

Sheaves of cloud
weeping seeds of rain
on plane leaves
wet and black
echo muffled on the lawn-
it’s autumn again.

Remembrance
of the sheaves of men
harvested
from French fields
engenders tears from heaven
for those who were slain.

© Kim M. Russell, 2016

Image found on Pinterest

My response to Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie B&P’s Shadorma & Beyond – Autumn Rain by DH Lawrence – October 1, 2016

It’s great to see Bastet back at B&P to open the new season of Shadorma & Beyond.  Today she is following the Candy’s lead, looking one more time at a poem and reinterpreting it using the shadorma form, in which each stanza has a syllable count of 3/5/3/3/7/5. Today we are being inspired by D. H. Lawrence, whose poem ‘Autumn Rain’ was published in February 1917 but was written in the autumn of 1916 when Europe was in the throes of the Great War.

Autumn Rain

The plane leaves
fall black and wet
on the lawn;

the cloud sheaves
in heaven’s fields set
droop and are drawn

in falling seeds of rain;
the seed of heaven
on my face

falling — I hear again
like echoes even
that softly pace

heaven’s muffled floor,
the winds that tread
out all the grain

of tears, the store
harvested
in the sheaves of pain

caught up aloft:
the sheaves of dead
men that are slain

now winnowed soft
on the floor of heaven;
manna invisible

of all the pain
here to us given;
finely divisible
falling as rain.

D.H. Lawrence