Jai K. – Oktoberlee Love – 5

 Oktoberlee Love
by Jai K.

I slept through those dying days of summer
just to feel her presence.
I hid in darkness
away from the burn of the sun still shining
on a world without her,
away from a universe still smiling without her,
merely surviving in candlelight
by sifting through every thought and memory
as if I could ever forget her.

I woke up in October on the hunt for waterfalls,
but it seemed it hadn’t rained since that last week in August;
the one that stole my mother’s last breath
before September almost took mine.

Still, I climbed over those barren slate slabs 
and reveled in the auburns, ambers, olives and ferns.
I watched the leaves fall ever so gracefully all around me, 
the forest decay with such beauty,
knowing soon it would all be hollow too.

Then eventually spring would come again
and all will be reborn under a new light
if they can survive the long, hard, 
cold and brutal winter.

Jai K. is  an author, poet and traveler who lives in Charleston, South Carolina. She is a lifetime creative whose work has appeared in Pennsylvania English, Penman Review, Where the Mind Dwells, Literary Yard, Georgia’s Best Emerging Poets 2017, The Evening Street Press, America’s Emerging Poets 2018: Southeast Region, and others. Her first poetry collection Just a Fly on the Wall Inside My Mind was released in January of 2019. When she’s not writing, she is out hunting waterfalls. It’s an actual sport, not a metaphor.