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
