Image: Andy Barnard

Yellow monsters lumber down the road again,
signs that we’re in the final weeks of calendar-summer.
It won’t be long ’til roads are canopied in red-orange-yellow, then carpeted,
then bare again. The air will cool, the sky will grey.

The seasons pass, like our youth.

Come spring, they’re reborn
in a burst of green,
but we march on, in a slow decline to whatever comes next.

Autumn gives us one last chance to make what we will of our lives.
A cleansing bonfire or a settling in to the path we’ve chosen.
There will be no other chances, not in this life.

It’s a time to look back
with the knowledge that what’s ahead,
at least in this incarnation, is finite.

Have we done what we were meant to?
What’s happened to our hopes and dreams?
What will we do with the seasons that remain?