A gogyohka for Frank Tassone’s weekly challenge. This week is red autumn foliage. The leaves don’t turn here with a spectacular display as they do in some parts of the world. It’s been a hard summer for the trees and many of them were showing signs of stress before the end of August. Lots of yellowing, and the grass is still dry and brown. The ash trees look miserable and the poplars are shedding big golden leaves like the wealthy tossing alms to beggars, but the rest are hanging on, still green.
summer dried and shrivelled
tree hearts ached
and autumn rains run dry from mean clouds
leaves cling fading green
dreaming of red gold fire
Jane Dougherty Writes 
Love it
Thank you!
Great last two lines. Nice imagery – The whole thing sounds just like fall.
Thank you! I’d love to see a real ‘fall’. Most of the trees here lose their leaves bit by bit, some not at all. They rarely go red. Usually gold and orange if you’re lucky.
Love the imagery of mean clouds witholding moisture! Sounds like you had a dry end to your summer as well!
The entire summer was bone dry, Dwight! We all remember the one downpour we had in August—that was it!
That is the way it has been here as well! Very dry!!
We have a bit of yellow too but not much else yet.
I’m sure trees dream in color. (K)
I hope they have dreams and not nightmares.
You could not blame them for having nightmares.
I don’t know how they’ve been coping with the drought poor things.
Oh–I love that idea!
BTW, I thought of you because my older daughter has been doing lots bird drawings recently. 🙂
I’ll be posting my bird for today later. I look forward to it.
I would love to see her birds. I’m not on Instagram though.
Reblogged this on Frank J. Tassone and commented:
#Haiku Happenings #3: Jane Dougherty’s latest Gogyohka for my current #Haikai challenge!
Thank you, Frank 🙂
The sad trees dreaming of red gold fire! (I like the mean clouds, too.). That is sad that it’s been so dry. Our trees are not showing much fire–but there is a bit of red on some of them.
I hadn’t really thought about it before, but this year it hit home. Our stream has two sources. One is dammed by a farmer and nothing gets over it in the summer. The other source is also dammed, but there’s always a steady overflow to fill the stream after the point where the two forks join. There would be enough water for all the trees that grow along the course of the stream except that our neighbour also dams it and he lets nothing at all get past. This summer, he has watered his sheep pasture and his vegetables and his orchard but the wild things and the trees have got nothing. The trees grew there because of the water. All it takes is for a couple of selfish individuals and the whole of a water course dies.
That is sad.
Sign of the times. The neighbour’s in his eighties. He’ll be dead soon.
Or maybe not. 😉