My Country is an Autumn Place

My Country is an Autumn Place
Christopher Bogart

Since I was a child,
and looked up at classroom walls
to pictures of pilgrims
dressed all in black, with white linen ruffs
walking through forests of new fallen leaves,
stalking wild turkey to complete the harvest feast,
my country became an autumn place,
a country of crimson and gold.

But I’ve never lived in the land of the pilgrims.
I live by the millstone that sits by the river
in Thomas Eaton’s town,
where yellow, rust and maroon mums
line single file across front lawns,
where cornstalks of faded parchment
are tied to lit lampposts, and where
carved pumpkins populate porches
of home after home.

I live in the land where the sharp scent of apple
mix with the earthy smell of damp leaves
raked into piles that line the curb.

I live in a land of autumn.

At that time of the year
in early November,
the promise of pilgrims
is dutifully fulfilled
by walking down Grant Street to Memorial School
on a brisk autumn night.

Just as the sun sets over red sugar maples,
extinguishing the flame of their falling leaves,
friends and neighbors are drawn in from all directions,
to do their civic duty, and
to affirm their equality with their fellow pilgrims
all throughout the land.

Their quiet yet friendly banter centers around
the possibility of frost on those porch pumpkins,
on the last cut of grass,
and their preparations for Thanksgiving
both as holiday and as holy day.

As I leave that school at dusk
To make my way back home,
Walking the sidewalks
from Grant to Clinton,
I realize how much
my country is an autumn place,
a small town, an Eatontown,
whose roads are lined
with piles of fallen leaves.

And as I turn ‘round the corner
to the street where I live,
I look up ahead of me,
straining in the dying light to see
the lamplight through the porch window and
the warming glow of home.