Like a Tap-Dancer (on a Leaf Xylophone)

Blushes on dawn’s yawning tarmac

Rouses bird-song, melts the veil

That soft-blanketed the landscape

Where the surging skylines pale

Tumbling, teeming, tick-tock thunder

Coursing through youth’s precious prime

Leaving in its wake fresh wonder

For the ancient ways of Time

Draws the laws of human-nature

Stalwart though its stance may be

To the place where face and stature

Proves mankind’s mortality

Leaping, steeping, sweeping torrent

Ever-ebbing in its surge

Meeting, melting in a moment

Where the past and future merge

Bathes the birth of day in Beauty

Earth and its fullness thereof

Tempers bonds of dream and duty

With the First Command; to love

Tests the best of bold bravado

And its jest, with gathered sheaves

Prancing, dancing like sun-shadow

On a xylophone of leaves

© Janet Martin