This piece was written in response to the dVerse Poets Pub’s Haibun Monday prompt, which invites writers to explore the theme of “falling.” I chose to descend into the sacred chaos of autumn—the season where beauty and death hold hands. Living in the Shawnee Forest lends me to many opportunities to engage with nature, orchards and falling leaves. Where nature doesn’t fade, it fractures. This is my offering.
The Orchard of Ash
The trees are shedding like old gods—bark split, limbs bowed, their offerings scattered across the ground like forgotten prayers. I walk the perimeter of the orchard, boots crunching through rot and memory. The air is thick with the scent of bruised apples and wet soil, a perfume of endings.
This is the season of descent. Not gentle, not poetic. It’s the kind that rips. The kind that reminds you that everything you built will one day be reclaimed—by wind, by worms, by time.
I watch a single leaf spiral down like a slow dagger. It lands on the grave of a sparring mat I buried last fall, soaked in sweat and blood and the names of fighters who never came back.
There’s beauty in this violence. In the way nature doesn’t ask permission to die. It just does. And in doing so, it teaches me how to let go—without apology.
Haiku
Ash in the orchard—
even the wind bows its head
to the falling leaf.
Thank you for visiting with me. For more Poetry or Literature related content, visit my blog at The Ritual. Copyright Mind on Fire Books.
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