What asks the dying sun to acquiesce?
What asks the maple for its final red?
Something draws us forward, nameless, unconfessed—
Through the needle’s eye between the living and dead.

The trees remember something we do not.
Their buds split wet and wordless through the frost.
Each bud a word that grief and time have wrought,
Painting the world with everything we’ve lost.

The sundial’s shadow barely seems to move.
A dragonfly, suspended, holds the pond.
Here even time forgets what it has proved—
The pause between the known and the beyond.

But nothing holds. The dragonfly moves on.
The sundial’s shadow lengthens toward the east.
The light has leaned away, withdrawn and gone—
The table cleared, the end of the small feast.

We stack the wood. We clean the chimney flue.
The light fails earlier with every week.
The yard looks older now with every view—
And we are learning what we’ll never speak.

The world is white. The trees are stripped and bare.
The birds have fled. The silence has a weight.
Our breath escapes and lingers, barely there—
And something in us settles down to wait.