Writing Resources from Fifteen Minutes of Fiction
The following is a piece of writing submitted by Laura on November 4, 2007
"I'm not sure how many people will get it from the title - it took my class a little while - but this is meant to refer to Simon and Garfunkel. I didn't want to title it that way, because that would have been too obvious, and this is sort of on a personal level. It's based off a song of theirs called "Leaves that are green." It opens with: "I was twenty-one years when I wrote this song. I'm twenty-two now but I won't be for long. Time hurries on - and the leaves that are green turn to brown." So I basically just wrote about the feelings that song brought to me, and tried to tie it in with their own mortality."
To Paul and Art
I hear your words in the softestEchoes of the trees, as breeze brings
Leaves that were green cascading
Down to my feet, the brown decay
I crush under crisp footsteps,
Crunching against your gentle voices
Which sing of broken hearts raked
Away by former loves.
My leaves have never fallen, and
Often I am given to reveling in green
As a permanent sapling would,
Feeding on last autumn's windfalls with
Greedy and youthful roots. I do not notice
The blight of time until it kills you;
Gradual decay creeps down and
Before I have time to remember, I see
Leaves and loves and cares and songs,
That flutter daily through the air -
Once you too were twenty-one,
Green and yet so eloquent of voice,
With enough vision through weather and wind
To see an aging tree of brown and withered
Leaves crumbling in hands and
Under feet, and know that it was you.
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