Autumn Reminder

I feel it stirring in the changing of the leaves,
the saturnine mood huddled under dripping eaves—
a bittersweet recollection: all things pass away,
even joys we clutch tightly, hoping they will stay.

Wherein lies the sweetness there, one may ask,
when the thoughts themselves in sorrow bask?
It is the fortune one tasted the sweetness at all,
those feathers of light which from fragile wings fall.

I do not begrudge the melancholia of this season,
for such reminders come with divine reason.
Hope does not spring from certain times, you see:
it clings like the promise of a yellow leaf to a tree.

If all things are ephemeral, so too is sorrow's face
and every passing sunbeam will have its place.
One cannot know a coin's single side sans opposite,
and expect to be of its true value cognizant.