Soon the Shrub Will Out

Soon the shrub will out …
Spring again —
The cycle of life repeating.
Image superimposed on image:
A face in a crowd reminding…

Of your face…
Of a lover’s face…
Of children’s  merry faces…
Gleaming — shining brightly.
A fleeting shadow flirting—

Dancing with us in the sunlight.
Flirting with such imagination:
Yours, mine, everybody’s…
Just anybody’s (It matters not).
The verdant shrub inclining.

Not hiding, but reminding…
Reminding us it’s Springtime.
Reminding with a nascent thought.
Emerging — and now nourished.
By a poet’s loneliness…

We poets dwell in loneliness…
Embraced by nature’s arms.
We poets are alone —
The world cannot contain our kind.
We see, we touch, we taste, we smell…

And we listen to and hear…
The music of the spheres.
We even live and die…
Only to rise again in dreams…
In fertile dreams…

Of our imagination.
We dream what other beings perceive…
As whispers of some foreign realm.
We are by virtue — not by choice…
Alone. Alone in wonderment…

Where shrubs will always bloom.
So soon the shrub will out…
Life passing on …
Another day, another year …
Season after season.

Sun ripening the corn —
Summer urging Autumn …
Winter’s blight diminished …
By the call again of Spring.
The Wheel  of Time a cycle.

Boys and girls through seasons.
Becoming men and women …
And the poet in a timeless world…
Fashioning with grandiloquence…
His pen, his feathered quill …

To etch the course of human destiny.
Soon the shrub will out …
Imagine it, image it …
The thought, the faces of humanity …
Dancing and prancing …

Unceasingly through seasons …
To etch the course …
Of human destiny —
Again — the shrub, the thought …
A metaphor of fleeting sacred life.