I.

Autumn leaves are seasoned

Into myriad memory metaphors.

When the seasons are done

Some grey out or slowly turn 

Into intense colours and burn

Glittering bright on stark boughs.

Like forgetting is the mind's winter

When thoughts begin hibernation

Autumn leaves come off and fall

All over the mind's darkest floor.

When you take a memory walk

Down this dank autumn forest

The brighter leaves claim the eye

And the rest are remaindered.

II.

A white moth came to my room

With a freight of superstition 

On its still dull white buttery wings. 

It sat equilaterally 

Like a perfect triangle 

sharp-ended  

With a lethal intent.

Its beady eyes fixed 

The silence with authority 

And imposed in the room 

An unearthly solemnity.

Coming from the guts of darkness

It asserted all the more its eeriness,

Superstition's primal pigments.

My study turned into an ideal setting

For communion with unknown beings

Or some truth that never goes

Beyond an unverifiable hypothesis.

I sensed an abiding equation

Between death and learning:

Knowledge never quite enlightens us;

It's a path from light to darkness.

Masud Mahmood is a Professor of English at Chittagong University.