These are autumn poems of remembrance, beauty, and an awareness of the cycles of life—the need to have our own conversations and reckoning with mortality.
The Best Autumn Poems
Read these autumn poems with a cozy mug of tea for your best reading experience.
1. Song for Autumn by Mary Oliver
Excerpt: Don’t you imagine the leaves dream now how comfortable it will be to touch the earth instead of the nothingness of the air and the endless freshets of wind? And don’t you think the trees, especially those with mossy hollows, are beginning to look for
2. Fall, leaves, fall by Emily Brontë
Excerpt: Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away; Lengthen day and shorten day; Every leaf speaks bliss to me Fluttering from the autumn tree.
3. Samhain by Annie Finch
Excerpt: (The Celtic Halloween) In the season leaves should love, since it gives them leave to move through the wind, towards the ground they were watching while they hung, …Now when dying grasses veil earth from the sky in one last pale wave, as autumn dies to bring winter back, and then the spring, we who die ourselves can peel back another kind of veil
4. Perhaps the World Ends Here by Joy Harjo
Excerpt: The world begins at a kitchen table. No Matter what, we must eat to live. The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on. …It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.
5. Under the Harvest Moon by Carl Sandburg
Excerpt: Under the harvest moon, When the soft silver Drips shimmering Over the garden nights, Death, the gray mocker, Comes and whispers to you As a beautiful friend Who remembers.
6. A Sunset of the City by Gwendolyn Brooks
Excerpt: Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love. My daughters and sons have put me away with marbles and dolls, Are gone from the house. My husband and lovers are pleasant or somewhat polite And night is night. It is a real chill out, The genuine thing. I am not deceived, I do not think it is still summer Because sun stays and birds continue to sing.
