Odes to Autumn: Two Poems by Anushri Nanavati
Photo: Karan Madhok
‘September is penned in the black ink of loss: / the carcasses of a thousand spiders / strung together, legs locked, tumbling / in tandem’
Why Autumn is also Known as Fall
September is penned in the black ink of loss:
the carcasses of a thousand spiders
strung together, legs locked, tumbling
in tandem out of the nib of autumn.
The trees that flung their leaves
like proud tresses of green to fan
the sky will soon droop and slump
under the weight of grief, the rust
and brown shrouds that moan, creak
and scatter with every tremor of wind, and—
falling becomes a kind of disloyalty,
a form of infidelity.
I walked away from you on the last day
of August, the last day of summer.
I could not expect warmth or spring,
just shadows, had-beens, and dead leaves.
*
Autumn, Not December
For once, it is I who has done the leaving,
for once, it is dull aches and not sharp twangs
of pain.
Crows do not alight feet-first on my scalp,
do not shed their feathers in veils of
mourning.
This grief is not black, it is the grey-brown
husk of sparrows, the melancholy of autumn, the timbre
of forgotten eyes.
The blue in my fingers recedes in waves. Soon,
my muscles will unclench and untangle, my bones
will fall back in place.
Your memory will not remain embedded
in my flesh, there will be no ash in the whorls
of my fingertips, and my voice will not falter
when it says your name.
***
Anushri Nanavati is the author of Birds, Bones, & Melancholia: Musings and Mutterings (Wipf & Stock Resource Publications, 2023) and the founder of Haiku & Hymns classes for children in Ahmedabad, India, where she teaches a variety of subjects, including creative writing, literature, language, psychology, history, and foreign languages. She is an external instructor for Cambridge International Assessments. You can find her on Twitter: @AnushriNanavati and Instagram: @birdsbonesandmelancholia.
