A DEAD DRAGONFLY

A Dead Dragonfly

My heart was moved to see you lying there,

your wings a silken tapestry

spread gracefully

in contrast to the roughness of the concrete path.

At first I thought that you were only resting

from the blissful rigours of a warm late-summer day,

but as I looked, and you remained as still as death,

I saw that, like the first leaf of the autumn fall,

you’d drifted gently down to earth

before the fierce battering of winter

had caught you in its morbid grip.

It seemed as if, perhaps,

you’d chosen your own time and place to die,

not hidden in the gloomy shadows,

but where the sympathetic sun

could still sparkle on your wings

and catch the living fire,

as when your agile body had first danced above the water

or flitted with the joyfulness of life

across the skyscape of a careless summer day.

So, death had not robbed you of your beauty

but just released you early to escape

a harder, crueller end.

DOWN THE SOLEMN DAYS

Down the solemn days

Down the solemn days of all my wanderings,

through basking, golden afternoons

or echoing across the vaulted stillness

and in the vast, black rages of the night,

I have come home,

to look once more upon the dreams I left

and see that they are good.

And to look once more upon old faces,

now etched with painful lines of mouldering memories,

and see that they are good.

By this brave fire I am bidden to sit down

and given autumn’s jam on new-baked bread,

and never asked about the things that I have done

or about the strangeness of the worlds that I have seen.

Here in this once-familiarity,

I can, at last, discover who I am

and am content with what I know.