MULTICOLOURFULISM FALLS TO THE ONE COLOUR REGIME

"Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower."

--- Albert Camus

The Imagine Nation of the Peoples Republic of Poetry has received numerous reports from poets throughout the northern hemisphere who have been making out with their muses. Everywhere the poem is the same.

Sing a song of seasons!
Something bright in all,
Flowers in the summer
Fires in the fall!
--- Robert Louis Stevenson

The Organization of Oxygen Producing Services, Deciduous Division, has been putting on a dazzling display of unbridled multicolourfulism. Throughout Northumberland, sugardaddy maples dominate the catwalk hills with inflammatory, amatory, scarlet skirts.

Thus sang the jolly Autumn as he sat,
Then rose, girded himself, and o'er the bleak
Hills fled from our sight; but left his golden load.

--- William Blake

The scientific community provides the botanical boilerplate explanation for this deciduous decadence, "It is the outcome of sap deprivation." It is the ‘golden load’ that spices the blonde fields and lawns once freckled with spring petal debris.

Though the same wind now blows around,
You would its blast recall;
For every breath that stirs the trees,
Doth cause a leaf to fall.
--- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The fields have been shaved of grain, trees unburdened of fruit. Nature greened excessive overtime plumping and juicing up our 100-mile diets. All this autumn extravagance disguises an ugly reality -- the massive layoff of leaves by oxygen producers. "A portion of the earth’s lung has collapsed," announced the Concerned Utopians for Sustainable Verdancy, renown to have a lengthy record of sounding alarms without an exclamation point.

There is silence: the dead leaves
Fall and rustle and are still;
Beats no flail upon the sheaves,
Comes no murmur from the mill

--- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Children fling their exuberant bodies into the crispy clutter of backyard piles; strolling lovers permit a moment of childhoodlum, kicking leaves gathered along gutters. There is no empathy for the sensitivities of the newly unemployed leaves.

They gather on sidewalks outside newspaper offices, yet no editor or columnist abandons their daily dance with mediacrity to acknowledge the unemployed masses being swept down the street in the shape of breezes and whirlwinds.

Cobourg has no tolerance for the diversity of leaves that have lost their sustenance. Everywhere they are mulched and bagged and shipped off to concentration composts without so much as a da svidanya as we head into the cold governance of the One-Colour Regime.

Only poets have the words to describe this mass ingratitude of fall freckles from last week’s resplendent redheads.

The warm sun is falling, the bleak wind is wailing,
The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying,
And the Year
On the earth is her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves dead,
Is lying.
Come, Months, come away,
From November to May,
In your saddest array;
Follow the bier
Of the dead cold Year,
And make her grave green with tear on tear.

--- Percy Bysshe Shelley