The Brown Season

Shades of brown – Jim Baker Reservoir – S. Adams County, Colorado. November 25, 2022

(note – the poem by family friend Jan Chism Wright of Brownville, Nebraska; photo by Rob P.)

The Brown Season

Fall’s grandeur’s faded
like tired flannel after
too many washings
reduced to nuanced,
subdued hues, a
monochromatic mosaic
of the brown season.

Black brown trees cower
naked limbed and trembling
in beds of brittle burlap.

Tawny, tufted, once tall grasses
bend over coal brown ground
like supplicants, beaten down.

Shorn fields sport sandy
brown, bearded corn stubble
or broad berber carpets bisected
by somber grey brown gravel.

Burnt sienna slowly seeps
from dried, dying veins
like bleeding madras
while umber slumbers.

The not so evergreen
juniper cannot keep
the rust from creeping
like a monk among
feathered boughs.

Sensibilities are shocked
on rare occasions
by a tart, gaudy green,
winter wheat field
or lone, long-legged,
eastern pine tree
lounging by the road.

And in the hollow stand
three cottonwoods crowned
in gold amid the dross,
silly, young, rebellious,
suborning a bit of beauty.

Defiant and determined,
foolishly unrepentant,
decrying their dark end
before they too must bow
to the brown season.

Jan Chism Wright
11/10/99