Of Echoes and Endings

The boast of the meadowland renders its mirth

Where June’s leaf-song lullaby covers the earth

Red mountain-ash garnet gleams bold on the air

A garnish to limbs; cold and scraggly and bare

The skyline is stripped of its verdant appeal

But keen winds are eager with refurbished zeal

Moaning through the woodland in ghostly lament

Victor of the tatters in autumn’s raiment

Yet still slips its haunting into Time’s great urn

Of triumph and trouble never to return

The echoes of summer and silence compete

Where innocence, progress and Providence meet

 

The belles of first autumn fall prey to the hour

Their beauty lies broken beneath wooded bower

Time; are you tyrant or mercy’s masquerade?

As fortune and folly beneath us are laid

And we, stumbling vessels of longing and lust

Tread on our future of dust unto dust

For we like the leaf, soon will render this clay

And only the soul will escape Time’s decay

But hope clings to Hope, as earth’s somnolent girth

A-waits the redemption of spring’s glad re-birth

And though for a moment the fallow is bleak

We trust in the promises buried beneath

The echo of summer may torment our tears

The dance of an hour soon shapes sudden years

The gasp of the flower falls into the dirt

Destiny consumes both life’s joy and its hurt

The reed, stiff, forlorn, braces for winter’s cold

The heart, tattered, torn must still bear to grow old

While kind wisdom kisses the grief in our sighs

And Beauty bestows her most coveted prize

For Time’s phantom power can never possess

The well-spring of love, hope and happiness

Spring, summer, autumn, winter; glaze the sod

On our waltz to the grave; on our journey to God

© Janet Martin