November's Guerdon

A wave of want and wonder

Washes soft, into a sigh

Beneath November-splendor

Of autumn's guerdon; good-bye 

The wind woos and siphons adieus of gold

From limbs languishing, lusterless and cold

Like artwork, pencil-sketched, etched on a page

Of mottled aftermath and frost-dipped sage

Where feet of come-and-going dash across

The hands committed to time’s albatross

The air is silence-steeped where loss of leaves

Muffles our tread with Whiling’s winnowed sheaves

The crown of nature (like all living must

After its breath of life) returns to dust

The dreamer and the doer, side by side

Caught in an urn of unrelenting tide

See, on the prow of Now, unstoppered chance

Runs through the brow of autumn’s weathered stance

Where blush of laugh-and-dancing June becomes

The hush to which each eager noon succumbs

Its particles of life-to-death enmesh

And meld to primal steppingstones of flesh

Ah, yes, we say, oh, no; and so it goes

The green fields of the mind cling to the rose

While season’s seamless synchronicity

Undresses and refurbishes the lea

Like illusion, warm in a child’s embrace

Is honed to the bone by breathing’s wild wind-chase

A mantle of purple presses its tulle

Across tresses of Time’s hulled push and pull

A hand of mercy blesses mortal plight

Replenishing the bud culled of delight

And where wild apples dapple dormant fields

Earth’s tomb is rife with bloom that springtime yields

© Janet Martin