In this poem, I want to say "...is the cycle of fall foliage", but I'm not sure if meguri is a good choice. I do not want to use katakana.


By the way, I'm still learning this app. Thanks for everyone's help!

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    It's very difficult to answer this if you conceal the subject... You don't have to share the entire poem, but could you at lest tell us the context and what this is supposed to describe? – naruto Aug 29 '18 at 17:38
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    @naruto Thank you so much for responding. So, I just didn't want to share the entire poem as it's forever on line and it's for an art piece I'm working on, but here is the verse in question: Red is... The warmth of the setting sun. / The touch of a woman's lips. / The cycle of fall foliage. ... So it's an abstract definition of the color red. – user31080 Aug 29 '18 at 19:33
  • Thank you, next, could you rephrase this "cycle" with a more concrete term? Is it something like this or something like this, or something else? – naruto Aug 30 '18 at 2:36
  • @naruto What about: The changing autumn leaves. – user31080 Aug 30 '18 at 15:19
  • @naruto Oh, you have such good sense! I like this verbiage: 色づく秋の葉. Thank you for all of your help. I'm sure I'll be back with more questions as I've forgotten so much of my Japanese. – user31080 Aug 31 '18 at 22:50

So I'm assuming you're trying to express the beautiful redness of 紅葉. In general, 巡り itself is a nice word that is suitable for poetry, but it's strongly associated with "cycling" (i.e. "red, blue, yellow, red, blue, ...", "north, south, north, south, ..." or "winter, spring, summer, fall, winter, ..."). 葉の巡り is not something we usually say, and it's unlikely to suggest 紅葉 because a red leaf never turns back to green. (秋の葉 suggests 紅葉 anyway, but 巡り kind of hinders such an interpretation.) If you want to suggest the color red without directly saying red, how about something like 色づく秋の葉 and 秋に染まる葉?

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