Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Temperatures are cooling--leaves are falling--as we prepare for the coming winter months.

Here's a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (March 24, 1919 – February 22, 2021), American poet, painter, social activist, and co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers.

An author of poetry, translations, fiction, theatre, art criticism, and film narration, Ferlinghetti was best known for his second collection of poems, A Coney Island of the Mind (1958), which has been translated into nine languages and sold over a million copies.

New York – Albany

God I had forgotten how
the Hudson burns
in indian autumn
Saugerties
Coxsackie
fall away through
all those trees
The leaves die turning
falling fallen
falling into loam of dark
yellow into death
Disappearing
falling fallen falling
those ‘pestience-stricken multitudes
blown all blasted
They are hurting them
with wood rakes
They are raking them
in great hills
They are burning them
the leaves curl burning
the curled smoke gives up
to eternity
Never
never the same leaf turn again
the same leaves burn
In a red field
a white stallion stands
and pees his oblivion
upon those leaves
washing my bus window
only now blacked out
by a covered bridge
we flash through
only once
No roundtrip ticket
never returning
the youth years fallen
away back then
Under the Linden trees in Boston Common
Trees think
through these woods of years
They flame forever
with those thoughts
I did not see eternity
the other night
but now in burning
turning day
Every bush burns
Love licks
all down
All gone
In the red end
Small nuts fall
Mine too.

--Lawrence Ferlinghetti, from Starting From San Francisco (1961)