The dead dry leaves of summer

This is the season in which leaves fall a lot.

Mostly they’re dead, dry leaves: brown in colour or a pale sickly yellow. They don’t leave you with a sense of beauty, as do the glorious red and yellow autumn leaves you see in more temperate climes. These are leaves that must be swept up and burnt ritually every year.

Walking through an empty tract of land in which nothing but teak trees stand, I wade through a sea of dry, crackling teak leaves. They’re eaten up by insects, and many are no more than skeleton leaves, ghosts of their former greener selves. High above me, the tall teak trees bereft of their large, unwieldy leaves seem naked and forlorn against the sky. There is no green to enliven the eye: everywhere is the bleakness of a summer death.

Soon the villagers will come and gather these dead leaves, piling them into separate small mounds. And then they will burn each pile as if it were a funeral pyre of someone not much loved, who will be forgotten with ease.

I am reminded of a gloomy poem by Robert Frost:

All season long they were overhead, more lifted up than I.
To come to their final place in earth they had to pass me by.
All summer long I thought I heard them threatening under their breath.
And when they came it seemed with a will to carry me with them to death.

They spoke to the fugitive in my heart as if it were leaf to leaf.
They tapped at my eyelids and touched my lips with an invitation to grief. . .

But, in another month or so, the rains will come and then these teak trees - which are as numerous as coconut palms in the landscape of Goa - will sprout green afresh. And everything will grow lush and green again.

And there will be a poem for that, too. A happier poem by Philip Larkin, a poet I really like.

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.