The Change In Us

At the drop of this season’s
first red leaf

I was no longer
what I had always been

and appeared
to those looking on

as something other than
surely human,

a figure obscured,
backlit by evening-slant glow.

Dear friends, fellow citizens
of this hard-changed world,

know how far we have come
and how far is left to travel;

know as well that I see you as
more or less the same way.

I assume we are still
the same as we were before

but, tempered now by isolation,
shifting light and cooling air,

we have somehow
moved closer to becoming

implacable, pure spirit; humans still
but now grimly enhanced

by a sense of how little time
we have left

before all around us
grows terminally cold.