I traveled north several hours to my daughter’s for Thanksgiving last week, and home again three days later. Through rural areas mostly, my favorite views were of the forests and orchards, oaks and maples and almonds, many of the trees with their leaves glowing yellow and red as the light caught them just right, against a dark green conifer background. The sun was, as this poem says, the artist.

THE SUN

All colors come from the sun. And it does not have
Any particular color, for it contains them all.
And the whole Earth is like a poem
While the sun above represents the artist.

Whoever wants to paint the variegated world
Let him never look straight up at the sun
Or he will lose the memory of things he has seen.
Only burning tears will stay in his eyes.

Let him kneel down, lower his face to the grass,
And look at the light reflected by the ground.
There he will find everything we have lost:
The stars and the roses, the dusks and the dawns.

Warsaw, 1943

―Czesław Miłosz