Funny how dull fruition is.
Summer is a drone, a lullaby,
While spring is glory, overwhelming reason,
Stirring the blood, sparking the heart’s cold fire.
The becoming, I think, is everything;
Being is hardly worth the time
When birth, after all, is the only life,
And death is a dream
Out of which flowers wake,
Blinking in the newborn, mid-May sun
And smiling on the living-dying world.
To live, and simply live,
And maybe at the most
Say something worth hearing
About what it was like to be
In a particular place and body
At a particular time,
Which maybe, if you say it well,
Means something to other people,
In their own times and bodies,
And with their own petty concerns,
Who catch a glimpse of something immortal
Gleaming just out of view,
And always disappearing over the horizon,
Leaving the soul in material night,
With only the memory of the warm sun –
But memory is the same as light,
Because after all, there is only the mind,
Watching a shadow on the wall of a cave,
And finding joy in the dancing shadow
For as long as light and memory last.
In the superstitious past,
This would have been an omen –
A harbinger of blight,
A warning of leaner times.
Today, it’s a party,
An excuse to travel,
To wear funny glasses
Or wave the colander around.
We’re hard up for wonders,
But we love an occasion –
And to that degree, at least,
We haven’t changed at all;
We’ll take any pretext
To don strange attire,
Concoct a new ritual,
And bask in the chosen day.
