Ode to the Ending of Summer

 Happy last day of summer, all!

Azure air is all a flutter with leaf-yellow butterflies

Where good-morning’s molten hello fades into saffron good-byes

Glints of scarlet tint the treetops hinting at autumnal crown

Finches chartreuse sun-bob deepens to a modest, mundane brown

And the garden, once a busy wonderland for dreamer’s feet

Is a ghost-town filled with echoes of love’s 'let-go' bitter-sweet

While the whiles that long we longed for, call to us from Bygone’s shore

As we lean to grasp at laughter from a Place that is no more

Save in whispers; we are creatures born to brave want’s filament

Where the severing of seasons stirs an honest discontent

For the heart at best can harbor only jaded fragments, oh,

Of a Summer and a Garden in thought’s phantom picture-show

Then, with noses pressed to windows of Present, stalwart we peer

To yon shadow-stippled skylines full of future’s belvedere

As we touch the such-and-much that molds our fumbling fingertips

And we hug the have-and-hold that with the gold of autumn slips

To the folds of farewell’s fortress; ah, this fellowship of days

Is a free-fall overflowing with Time’s ever-weaning ways

While it draws an awed awareness of the sacredness of This

How the blush and rush of moments burns us with a lover’s kiss

Then turns cold, and we are old and summer-longs of quickened youth

Are like hazy, far-off outlines of a life before the truth

Of trite tick-tock seared its tally in the valleys of our skin

And the tree that sheds its glory feels to us like next of kin

For we sense in its undoing the hierarchy of all life

How its blooming and its beauty will fall prey to autumn’s knife

And the summer-long we longed for slips through fingertips to naught

Save the picture-shows we harbor in our hearts and in our thought

As we stand upon the fault-line that will winnow with its sighs

Frames filled with fields flushed with harvest and hushed mother-like good-byes

© Janet Martin