By Roger Knight
Summer’s Departure
Those unmistakable tell tale tinges of red and yellow,
is nature’s confirmation that summer has already been
seen off for another year.
And with that departure, like a spreading grief in it’s
melancholic mantle, autumn becomes the unrelenting invader,
with summer now well in retreat.
Not until every bough has been stripped bare and all it’s leaves scattered
will this seasonal occupation be complete, in readiness for winter’s arrival.
Already, I miss the verdant splendour of summer and hope that I will still be
here to revel in it’s return,
remaining a transient spectator of nature’s ever changing pageantry
that will continue long after I have gone, as it did before I was even born.
The Positivity of Recall
In the midst of all this ill and woe,
it still helps to recall when I last felt good
and when something went right instead
of going wrong,
however infrequent or long ago.
That infusion of well being and euphoria
that affirms a reassuring place and role in
the world, even if only transitory.
The reawakening of the sense of possibility
no matter how remote, is like a sunbeam on a
dark dungeon floor or the carol of a bird that
briefly visited Byron’s Prisoner of Chillon.
No matter how bleak this time might be,
we should still savour and recelebrate
that positive things can happen when we felt
good about ourselves in the order of things,
despite this prevailing season of sorrow.
I am reminded of Stephen Spender’s comment about mastering chaos a little, which I think to some extent is achieved. There is the element too of trying to make sense of something that has impacted so significantly on our lives, of trying to see things as they really are. Attempting to harness the paradox of earth cradling life and then entombing it as Carl Sandburg so eloquently put it.