It's Still Life

The wheat stood like an army of old men, with their backs bent but unbroken, their gold gone dull under the autumn flat sky. A kestrel circled high above — on a breeze that smelled of turned earth and too soon endings. Its cry was a needle pulling a thread of silence through the day. This was not a harvest; it was a surrender. The field had given all it could. Now came the long, cold accounting. Darkness, after all, is not the absence of light, but the patience of the soil. The true season of endings was only just beginning.