Beloved summer that drifts abound,
as the nightly thrush intones his last,
thought, once more, and billows away,
into the heart of the darkness past.
Yet where are the stars as the sun is dying?
I am on the hill in the falling rain,
for water is pure on the autumn’s eve,
the temporal ebb and flow begins again.
Lo, I read Yeats, sailing into course,
fixed upon the waves that tremble and fall,
the distant lines on Dover Beach,
and the gratitude of the Mending Wall.
Such love, this love! The craven weeps.
And this was the summer of such content! -
hence now upon dawn the last calls are ailing,
moments are left wanting for a moment unspent.
So splendor awakes with the lauding lark,
and I, being man, must listlessly fade,
apart from Apollo and the fiery sun,
perhaps to some place that engenders more shade.