Ode to Summer Do you too remember those true summer days, Languid and sweet and slow, honey-like and thick with heat? A dream of peaches melting into liquid gold as if to say That this alone is truth: Life is gentle, purely sweet, And winter is a fiction of absurd dismay, Ridiculous and foreign. Bright days, only, then, one long lullaby; Rhythms of lake water lapping, lulling, an oar dipping amid rippled blue; The cat leaping -- the only quickness in the napping afternoon -- to claw bravely at the line-draped sheets; And your hands, tender, mud-lined, lifting my small body upwards to the sky. In the pink dusk, at last, the air thick with crickets’ song, In the scent of day-baked stone and rose, the shadows dark and low and long, Impossible thing, it seemed to me: That eternal golden day would end! -- Dissolving with alacrity, from blazing gold to tender pink to dull dust grey, A rapid and consuming void. Black night taught another truth: The brightness does not to us belong, And what is loved and ripe -- though strong and good -- does not Time’s eager march suspend. Years now have passed and brought their weighty blights; I cannot now melt so easily into the syrupy light. I know of winds and waste, their heft and hue, The ways of danger lurking in sharpest noon. But still, of countless seasons of my life, I treasure most of all Those long, kind days when I was small, And sure that love was all, and sweetness too; that brightness could cocoon, Keep safe the precious, hold off the gloom. It is a virtue, I believe, to place one’s trust all in the day, To keep faith with what is gold and good and gay And give oneself, wholehearted, to a honeyed afternoon. What more blissful form of love? To what gentler calling are we born? That youthful, sleepy trust is gone – another loss, another thing to mourn.