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On Green and Gilded Leaves

On Green and Gilded Leaves

A prompt about writing nature poetry.

Sean Glatch
November 12, 2025

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Freewrite
Poem: "November" by Maggie Dietz
Divinations
Prompt
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Freewrite

With this freewrite, as well as all freewrites, do not put any pressure on yourself to be good. You are simply getting thoughts on the page. You can write in poetry or in prose, but feel free to write poorly, sloppily, redundantly, and with cliches. Now is the time for ideas—we will eventually sculpt those ideas into art.

Look out your window or take a walk. What's happening in nature where you are right now?

Are leaves falling or awakening? What blooms or decays, awaits bloom or decay? How do the animals act?

Pay attention to the sky, the air, the dirt, the grass, what's far away and what's right in front of you.

Freewrite about this moment in nature. Bear witness to both the beauty and the violence. Include the particulars of your particular context in the world, whether you live in the city or far away from it—nature includes both the rats in the bushes and the rats in the trash cans.

Poem: "November" by Maggie Dietz

Retrieved here.

Show's over, folks. And didn't October do
A bang-up job? Crisp breezes, full-throated cries
Of migrating geese, low-floating coral moon.Nothing left but fool's gold in the trees.
Did I love it enough, the full-throttle foliage,
While it lasted? Was I dazzled? The beesHave up and quit their last-ditch flights of forage
And gone to shiver in their winter clusters.
Field mice hit the barns, big squirrels gorge

On busted chestnuts. A sky like hardened plaster
Hovers. The pasty river, its next of kin,
Coughs up reed grass fat as feather dusters.

Even the swarms of kids have given in
To winter's big excuse, boxed-in allure:
TVs ricochet light behind pulled curtains.

The days throw up a closed sign around four.
The hapless customer who'd wanted something
Arrives to find lights out, a bolted door.

Divinations

What a gorgeous poem to commemorate the (Northern Hemisphere) autumn. Gorgeous not only for its close attention to nature, but for making us pay attention as well.

Why does this poem work so well? The critic Viktor Shklovsky puts it much better than I can. In his seminal essay "Art As Device", Shklovsky defines successful art as the ability to "estrange" its subject matter—by making the familiar seem strange or new, art shifts our perspective and thus impacts us.

This is the task of much successful literature. But nature poetry in particular bears the heavy weight of estrangement. Not only are we all familiar with nature, but we have all read countless nature poems, by way of nature being such a constant source of beauty and insight. So the nature poet's task, then, is to show us nature in a way we haven't seen it before.

Dietz is doing that here. Notice how commonplace events in autumn are personified, with estrangement itself a tension in the poem. The further the poem goes, the more strange and delightful its descriptions of nature become. Some examples:

Nothing left but fool's gold in the trees.

Calling autumn's leaves "golden" is nothing new, but "fool's gold" adds a subtle, provocative spin on autumn's affair. Are the leaves lying to us? Are we fools appreciating their beauty?

The bees

Have up and quit their last-ditch flights of forage
And gone to shiver in their winter clusters.

Of course we know that bees do this in autumn: forage intensely, then cluster against the coming cold. But this is an element of bee life that we don't often picture. We see the honey-making, flower-seeking, skin-stinging business, but, I admit, I never think about bees in the wintertime. (Weirdly enough, this is the second bee-related poem I've shared a prompt on recently.)

A sky like hardened plaster
Hovers. The pasty river, its next of kin,
Coughs up reed grass fat as feather dusters.

What gorgeous similes! "A sky like hardened plaster" is both true and successful in its surprising comparison. To then describe the pasty river as the sky's "next of kin" reminds us of the interconnectedness of things—and "fat as feather dusters" similarly describes nature through the manmade and artificial.

Even the swarms of kids have given in

Notably, the only animal that swarms in this poem is our children. A good reminder that we are part of nature, too.

The days throw up a closed sign around four.
The hapless customer who'd wanted something
Arrives to find lights out, a bolted door.

This is the poem's climax of estrangement, and it arrives at something that, to me, feels numinous. The sunset is a closed door and what we seek of the day has disappeared. Isn't there something bigger-than-us about that? It gives in to pathetic fallacy—the tendency to give nonhuman entities human feelings—but also reminds us of how beholden we are, still, to nature's power.

I think often about how separated human life feels from the natural world. Of course, I live in a densely metropolitan place, so it's only natural that nature feels like an anomaly to me. I have to remind myself that the flies and raccoons in the dumpsters are still nature—as are the lonely trees plunked between slabs of concrete, the cirrus clouds of pigeons thinly wisping above the avenue of parades or taxi cabs. For most of us, wherever we live, our worlds interrupt nature, rather than negotiate with it; besides, our roads and bridges and maps and screens and engines and electric lines all manufacture a world separate from the world that raised us. My apartment window, I'm sad to say, hardly catches the sky, so when I walk outside and see that lone cloud firelit by the setting sun, I always hold my breath.

But we are nature, and nature is in us. Somehow, that includes city skylines and sewer pipes. When nature poetry "sticks the landing," it arrives at the necessary reminder that we are all tethered to this Earth, still, and must (re)learn to live with and inside it. How lovely it is to share this glittering blue marble with you.

Prompt

Write a nature poem! Bear witness to nature around you, and use the poetic tool of estrangement to transmit nature's impact to the reader.