Victor here. How this autumn sunshine does drone on and on! And how sick it makes one when one’s mood is in the darkest throws of winter! Alas, I digress. Many of you have written to me asking more about my poetry, I thought I would go ahead and share some of it with you all. Okay, I cannot tell a fib, no one has written to me asking about my poetry, but I thought I would share it anyways. This one is called “The Forgotten Leaf” and I wrote it after one of my morning walks. You see, I was out just after the sun had risen and was coming up over the small hill by our house where there is a large maple tree. Over the mist I could just make out a group of children hunched over by the tree, gathering fallen leaves into a basket. As I began to approach them, they scurried away in fear and I heard them whisper, “There he is, the scary dark boy, the one who always looks so sad!” I stood there in shock with my head hung to the ground. Could this really be? I had, on occasion, caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and remarked on how ghostly I often did appear, how my pale face lacked the colour that seemed to effervesce in Elizabeth’s face, how the purple circles under my eyes seemed to darken like Dante’s rings, and how the hollows of my cheeks seemed to show I was far older than my years in comparison to the lovely plumpness of my mother’s cheeks. Was I to be, as these children made of me, the villain out of a fable? Was I fated to be the monster they made of me, their boogie man? As I looked down at the leaves they left behind I saw not the blisteringly bright red maple leaves that pooled in their basket but the old, crumpled bunch, all sad and scoured over. The leaves that, having been neutered from the old branches, and passed over by the chubby hands of the children for a spot or a blemish, an asymmetric vein, a stem not intact enough to be satisfactory, would stand there in the blood black soil, the autumn dampness engulfing them until the insects would finally make their claim.
