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Autumn Leaves

Chapter 7: WHAT WILL THE HARVEST BE?
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About This Book

A compact poetry collection gathers short lyrical and didactic pieces that reflect on mortality, memory, love, duty, and spiritual consolation, often using nature and seasonal imagery to frame moral and emotional insights. Many poems shift between wistful reverie and exhortation, imagining dreamlike flights, harvest metaphors about deeds and consequences, prayers, meditations on motherhood and friendship, and speculative lines about reincarnation and the afterlife. The work mixes tender sentiment, moral counsel, and pastoral description across brief, accessible poems that alternate consolation with sober reminders of life's hardships.

WHAT WILL THE HARVEST BE?

We are sowing, we are reaping,
We are laughing, we are weeping
For the seeds we sow.

We are giving, we are hoarding,
Are withholding or dispersing
Broadcast o’er the land.

Are they thorns, or are they roses?
Are they weeds, or are they posies?
That we cull from life?

What confronts us at Life’s evening?
What will greet us on awaking?
Will it be Love’s flowers?

O the joy of loving, living,
If to others we are giving
Out of our heart’s store.

Let us do what is before us,
Not discouraged, not unhappy,
If some good we’ve done.

When we wake in the hereafter,
Is it tears, or is it laughter,
That will meet us there?

We shall sometimes be confronted,
And by phantoms shall be haunted—
Phantoms of our past.

Let no thought of dire deception
In our hearts have e’er inception,
Then not haunted we

By the ghosts of indiscretion,
By ill deeds and degradation.—
Let us all beware

Of temptations e’er surrounding,
And of evil e’er abounding.—
We must shun them all.