Sonnet of Sorrow and Summer Dusk

After the storm God sweeps the clouds awry

We stand without a word beneath it all

He spreads His miracle across the sky

Consoling earth with heaven’s madrigal

The aftermath of daylight cups our cares

In chalices of mist and moor and mead

Above, an ocean filled with people-prayers

Unveils a flawless floor where angels tread

And we, but beggars for God’s daily grace

Pause in this paradise of dusk’s embrace

Time’s fortune that perplexed our midday pain

Seems dull beneath this Brigadoon of bliss

Knowledge recoils; our noisy notions wane

What can we say beneath a sky like this?

And what is man, when we consider He

Who commandeers the spheres beneath His Feet?

We recognize our frail mortality

As dust settles where life and death compete

This grappling undertow of give and take

Is but the preface to our last heartache

Just as a river runs into the sea

And we cannot reverse its onward flow

Time flows forward yet into history

Its height and breadth and width we do not know

Nor can we prophecy tomorrow’s fare

We are not gods but merely mortal men

Darling, beneath this miracle of air

I cannot put mouth-babble in a pen

This little song-and-sorrow rigmarole

Is a riptide that we cannot control

© Janet Martin

Awe clashed with grief as we stood beneath dusk’s banner of beauty. Our school-community mourns the loss of a kindergarten student, who died suddenly this morning.