The deceitful summer tricks the trees, roots, and animals into momentary prosperity.
Later, leaves yellow, then leap from trees in a tumbling lamentation at green’s going off.
Winter pales and shrouds the gladiolas from witnessing spring’s demise.
Twilight mourns the bright, babe of morn with a black cloak.
Yet the moon remains hopeful, bearing a light in hopes of a Lazarus effect.
Curious stars come out to see what foolishness the moon reflects.
Lo, the sun lays on a catafalque below the horizon, a deceptive tomb.
Meteors streak about in desperation to lend luster to the commotion.
They too burn out. Then the stars, one by one, take their candles elsewhere.
Still the moon radiates faith in the day, that it might rise like a crane in the East.
None understand this steadfast paraclete making only a muted, creamy stain in the dark.
A celestial body might stave off pending doom, but it knows the folly of fending off the gloom.
The shining adherent of the life in the skies begins to lose faith in its effort slowly.
Its luminescent desire waxes, wanes, waxes, wanes, waxes and wanes again
until it grows weary and ashamed of the time it sacrificed to resurrect the day.
A feeling of failure mars its venture out and it becomes a crestfallen crescent.
Soon the time will pass when it looks out over the soil and ducks forever into the
blackness as a tired recluse might after opening a door to sip the outside air.
With the moon hidden in the depths of the grim shroud, night falls.
On the following day the sun will not shot show.
Clouds will come to cry for somehow they are sure that the leaves will fall
Whether seasons are in transit or not
And so it rains on the lawn of a woman’s house
Where she lies dead on her couch
Her husband will come home with no leaves to rake from the rain gutter
Because the clouds will obscure nature’s evidence of the dying sunrise
Because death has nothing to show to him
Except the unnatural and eerie sensation a person gets when seeing
A female body so far from its natural element dead a living room.
The next day he will rake leaves that have been blown about the trees
While he thinks of the way his wife’s ashes scattered
Like so many seeds dripping from a gardener’s hand.
May the sun not char them.

Text_KJ