Pecans

William James Rosser

December 7, 2025

The first week of autumn’s yellow, 

bitter winds blow through my yard, cold,

dumbing the weight of long summer.  

Amid leaves and dead web worm nests,

the green fruit has begun dropping 

intermittently from my gnarled-

by-storms, by whitewashed-years, Kanza Pecan:

splitting on swept-clean, cracked concrete 

and the rain-softened earth.

From crow nests near the mast’s farthest  

reaches, on a staked-down blue tarp, 

I am reaping the late harvest.  

A bumper-crop, to say the least,

up eighteen-points from last season – 

Under this obelisk, supine,

I dwell on the nuts up high and 

rare. Upper echelons, highest 

twisted limbs clinging olive-hued,

ovalesque and juglone-soaked hulls

housing hard, brown, furrow-browed shells, 

like broads, highfalutin dames, sun-

down in alleyways clutching pearls.

While, low-hung near the muck, ill-fed, 

the young hurl theirs to grass muddled 

like mojito mint sprigs – and when

the top brass falls windswept, I must 

gather them all under hammer….

         Come dusk, I’ll

leave cracked shells, mauled husks, old mildewed 

meat, to cater vermin scouring

my compost heap. Three brash squirrels  

descending knotholes, limbs and eaves, 

nipping the hangers-on, stowing 

the few they may reap – eat, then sleep. 

William James Rosser is a retired sommelier living in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He studied journalism and literature at Lamar University, and is influenced by the poetry of, among others, Archibald MacLeish, Robert Penn Warren and Philip Levine. Rosser's work has appeared previously in Texas Poetry Assignment and Rat's Ass Review. He writes from a century-old house, at the foot of the Osage Hills.