Leaves Are My Flowers Now

Leaves Are My Flowers Now is one of two songs written for The Schubert Club
Songbook, a project initiated by the American Composers Forum as a tribute to
Bruce Carlson (1940-2006), the Schubert Club’s long-time executive director.

Leaves are my flowers now.
Basswood and sumac,
their banners and flags,
aspen and oak,
their shreds, their ribbons, their rags
flutter and rattle.
Leaves are my flowers now.
Now is most fruit
shrunk to husk,
petal to small skull;
now are most things
gone from air,
now I see no dragonfly
out over water,
nor butterfly, with high sails
of yellow and black,
nor wasp, whom frosts
have silvered and slowed.
Now is light expert
among them, takes first
this pulse, then this one,
now shines a little
this surface, now
stains, now prescribes.
Clearer and clearer
the paths I pick.
Basswood and sumac,
their banners and flags,
aspen and oak,
their shreds, their ribbons, their rags
flutter and rattle.
September is almost over
and leaves are my flowers now.

–Michael Dennis Browne
used with the permission of the poet and Carnegie Mellon University Press