He didn’t know it was all inside,
	inside the leaf and that the green
is just an overlay -- the chlorophyll
put there to suck in CO2 and breathe
out sugar
          which somewhere along the line
                   becomes O2.
			Nice idea. Let’s keep
			      it...................going,
except in the fall when the green
goes away till another day
revealing the yellow and orange and red --
gorgeous colors that were always there
and then 
        dropping 
                dead 
                    as a 
                         doornail
onto the lawns to be raked into piles
and put in the streets
so kids could burn them
with a potato wrapped in tinfoil

                                      inside.

Twice there was something good
inside -- 
under the green and
in the wonderfully aromatic
smell of burning leaves,

                                      a hot potato.