‘Neath morning-tide’s adaptive skies
Summer, in pauper-tatters lies
Like scattered rags of human sighs
Where Dream and Doing lives and dies
…while Liberty, that Awesome Test
Derives surrender and conquest
Like seasons in the human breast
Where lupine zeniths yield to rest
…and all along the corridor
Of yet-to-come and days-of-yore
Like leaves strewn on an unkempt shore
Where Aftermath and Motive war
…the core of Offspring weeps and groans
Reaping from carcasses and bones
Like scavengers, the undertones
Where summer fell among the stones
…and all our climbing ways succeed
In proving elemental need
Like flower that returns to seed
Where ox and baron plant and plead
And somewhere in between the sweep
Of Unknown and Past’s primal sleep
Like avatars akin to sheep
Where we plunge through days, mercy-deep
…part of an age-old pageantry
Twixt what-once-was to what-must-be
Like waves succumbing to the sea
We take our place in history
© Janet Martin
