Time. Time mends everything doesn’t it?
We become old and decrepit, losing memories along with our minds.
Time passes and heals old wounds, the pains and tears of the past.
But the cost is great too…we age.
Age comes and strength leaves, time is a blanket long stifling us.
Still memory lives on for a while.
Memory of frog-hunting summers,
always alone,
always in a wood somewhere
down a little dirt road in the backwoods,
eating wild strawberries
whispering to the trees and wind,
searching for the magic deep within the forest never found.
The seagulls singing in the sunshine and the waves upon the shore.
Sailboats and their masts…
koolaid in the grass
and exploring the swampy marshes.
Then fall came with pumpkin faces and fields a-harvest.
The geese followed each other over the moors,
over the forests,
and the owls went to their secret owl-haven
deep within the trees.
The leaves caught fire crimson and gold
and dropped frosted to the ground.
Did Tchaikovsky’s fairies do their dance in enchanting fall to winter?
The crickets ceased their chirping,
and the waves stopped frozen into
but an echo of the far off distant waves, underneath the ice.
The snow comes, but the trees harbor from the wind.
Out of the forests in the fields and moors
wind cuts like a knife bleeding the skin cold to ice.
Shatters into an ice-cold silver sky fading into grey.
Even the moon cried in agony.
Amid the drear and cold a warmth grew…
like a seed it sprouted and songs
and hymns were sung as church bells rang and trees were decorated and everyone…everyone seemed happy.
Then the winds returned in their hatred
of the rapturiously joyful sight and people
brought out boxes of photographs
remembering the days of summer.
The only joy of winter is getting out of it.
The warmth of going inside
and eating cookies and drinking hot chocolate
and snorily sleeping the days away
is the only counterpart to such a merciless wind.
Sleep and dreams take you to far away places
with alligators and roses and starry starry skies.
CRACK the dawn awakes with a sunshine
and the ice BREAKS and you pick up your spirits from the floor
put them on snuggily and know deep within you that spring and love and hope came with the morning.
The snow falls like leaves of autumn from the trees in clumps and rain begins,
refilling the marshes and waking forest branches like a morning shower.
Cold at first but warming us back into summer with green leafbuds…
Memory is times’ nemesis, but time defeats memory
and at the end we die, passing into darkness of the unknown…
because nothing lasts forever.
That summer is over and winter was but a dream,
spring a relief all too long ago experienced.
The sailboats crashed upon the rocks.
The forests have been cut and the marshes have been drained.
The child grew up a long time ago.
She experienced demands and boys and money and expectations and became lost forever in the Illusion of Life.
And all that remains now is the old woman inside me,
smoking her cigar and stroking her cat
as the petunias kiss the sunset
and she mumbles soft insanities to herself.