Earth Pathways Showcase

The last greens of summer had given way to autumn. The trees were shedding their leaves, and even the mulch on the floor had tightened and sunk inwards as if being swallowed back into the earth. Everywhere I looked, the forest was brown. The trees were growing more bare and brown and becoming as empty as lace against the sky, and below them in the earth carpets of nuts waited for us to gather them. Everything seemed to grow darker. Even the pines, the holly and brambles seemed to have drawn a darkness into themselves, as if thickening their evergreen for the coming winter. Each day the sun penetrated the forest less deeply, and then one morning I woke up and there was frost.

First Frost (from the novel Earthheart) © Hannah Fries 2023

Sitting in the sun -
my face is burnished gold
and the world a hum:
I hear the songs of birds
and the breeze shaking out dry leaves
on the bush behind me.
Like bones, that bush
rattles its dead wood;
left by autumn
and forgotten by winter,
it is the skeleton of last year.
All around the pregnant earth is murmuring.
I hear in the sunlight
the voice of spring
and I feel in the golden warmth
the birth of new life.
The beginnings are singing,
and the joy of life is bursting
fresh upon my senses.

February © Hannah Fries

I want to spray a whole field with my love,
Soak it!
So that in spring ten thousand wild flowers appear
and shake their seeds.
And so every spring,
until one hundred years from now this whole valley
will remember my love,
though I am gone.

One Hundred Years © Hannah Fries