I was invited to a painting class. I confessed I only know how to paint with words, so they placed four images before me. This is the first of my drawings:
The lady with a red umbrella,
she glides through autumn fire.
Her dress,
a river of flame.
Amber. Gold. Whispers of fire
spilling into the slow-burning air.
The sky scorches.
The woods curl into embers.
Branches tremble like ancient hands.
Leaves shiver.
The ground exhales heat
beneath her passing.
The path—a ribbon of flame,
edged in trembling blue.
The only mercy
from the fevered red.
It flickers.
The sky holds its breath.
Her umbrella rises,
a crimson moon.
A banner.
A shield.
Quiet defiance.
Colours fold.
Fracture.
Splinter.
Reform around her.
Autumn bends to her rhythm.
Listens. Waits.
Unfolds with every step.
She moves
with the inevitability of myth.
Untouched by fire—
yet leaving her mark.
Each footfall
plants a seed
of another fall,
another season,
where red and blue
might finally meet.
The trees lean closer.
Blackened limbs reach,
not in menace,
but in reverence.
She is the herald of the blaze,
the keeper of the sky.
The path stretches,
infinite.
The air shimmers with heat,
with possibility.
Behind her, the fire softens.
Folds into memory.
Into the promise that next autumn
she will return.
And the blaze will bloom again
at the sweep of her umbrella—
a symphony of red, gold, blue.
A world reborn
beneath her quiet command.
