Only A Leaf
WHEN the late leaves lit all the place,
He left her with her ashen face;
“We shall not meet!” he lightly cried;
“Good-bye, sweetheart, the world is wide.”
Though bright the sunshine on that day,
Though the bare boughs around her lay,
She thought in blackened shadow stood
The melancholy autumn wood.
She bent, and lifted from the sod
A leaf whereon his foot had trod,—
An idle leaf, but dead and sere,
It held the heart’s blood of a year!
Harriet Prescott Spofford.