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Autumn Leaves

Chapter 96: INGRATITUDE.
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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.

INGRATITUDE.

If we should help a friend in need
We would not have him kneel
In humble, abject gratitude;
And yet—we’d have him feel

Some little kindness in his heart,
Sometimes to it allude.
“For sharper than a serpent’s tooth”
Is base ingratitude.

We try to keep the rule laid down,
“Let not your right hand know”
What e’er your left may give, or do,
Though friend may change to foe.

Though friends ignore what we have done,
And often cause us pain,
We still will help to lift the loads,
And burdens on them lain.