Autumn Leaves

Chapter 77: GIVE SMILES, NOT TEARS.

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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.

GIVE SMILES, NOT TEARS.

Give to the world your happy thoughts,
Too many give but tears.
A word, a thought, a deed full oft
Makes some heart sad, or cheers
Some lonely, weary, world sick soul,
Who now will drop his cares,
And even smile at his defeats,
And disappointment bears.

For in his heart is now a hope,
A hope for better things.
The world is now not half so sad,
And joy it even brings.
If you are sad, hide grief beneath
A happy smiling face.
No one is better for your tears,
Nor stronger for Life’s race.

Then bury grief within your heart,
And dig its grave full deep;
And cover it with flowers of Hope,
And do not o’er it weep.
Too many keep their sorrows fresh
By tears too often shed.
Look up! Look out! Your sorrows hide,
And rest in Hope’s own bed.