Saturday 27 February 2016

Late Summer of My Seasons

By William Scott

Like the year,
I am in the lateSummer of my seasons.
Full of green;
a tired green though,
tipped with brown.

The first leaves 
have begun to cover the pavement, and grass 
of Bad Heilbrunn.
Such a mass is yet to fall!
There is still hay to cut,
fruit to pull;
the hearty may yet swim in the lake.
For all this,
a crisp scent of borrowed time begins upon the air.

The Season's descent will be sudden.
The few brown leaves will turn to many,
turn to all;
with hardly a hope of notice
they will be of the Ground.

Some
wetly obliterated under feet on cobble;
some 
matted in grass
to be blanketed in snow;
some 
raked and rotted.

Others
rescued by small hands,
glued to paper and painted other colours,
or pressed between unread pages,
set up high on reliquary shelves
brought down in mid-winter’s death,
little fingers, delicate, studious,
running (amazed) over ancient lacework
of wooden veins.

Still,
some others
blown to a dry spot,
out of our use-seeking gaze.
They,
enduring the chances of dark and cold,
will be witness to the swell of infant buds;
Anastasia trudging in her green galoshes. 

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