Autumn Soup
We walk the lanes, our breath before us,
the earth and the sun at grateful angles.
The ease of your steps, the brightness
in your eyes is a lesson. Hands held, laughter, taking time as it is—
the being here that makes life worth the trouble.
Each day is new colour in the leaves.
We point this out to each other,
cross the roads carefully.
There is little purpose to our strolling,
nor should there be. The delight of this world
is gratuitous; the design of beauty merely
to be beautiful.
I don’t need to tell my daughter
how wonderful this is.
We stumble upon the chestnuts,
hundreds of them, a new ground,
some of them split open in invitation.
I show you how to avoid most of the spikes
(you can’t get around getting hurt completely)
and we fill our pockets—just one more,
more and more.
I stir this feeling into a pot of soup;
living simply is a comfort food.
Gideon Heugh
Gideon Heugh 