Poem in the Broken Seasons
The piney watchers watch.
A ripple takes the pond,
wakes waters that lie still
deeper than eye can reach,
as deep as light can sift.
A tree breaks from its leaves.
Nothing that lives, but grieves...
In
silence, June retreats:
heat of summer in air,
heat of air on all
the watchers in the trees.
The pond is still once more.
In passage of the year
I shall learn how to please...
The essence of the pond
is air: is to float free,
circling entranced
amidst the broken leaves.
I feel a ripple rise
in my slow body now,
and yet I have not moved
silent through the trees
or stillness of the air,
except to touch the pond.
What place is there to turn?
What hope of breaking free
from circle of the year,
except it turns with me?
The dreaming pond, the air,
trees, watchers even, all
are body of changing love,
encircled in the year.
My voice, my heart, are mute.
The deaf ear hears, but love,
love cries for ways to speak...
Muted in kind, the trees
whisper, remark their days
in passages of quiet and of voice.
Body discovers pond.
Ripple is all.
The season is love. Bright air
sings through the watching trees...
-- Robert N. Ward
Robt. Ward is a poet and photographer, retired from a 25 year career as an Architectural Photographer. He is the publisher of The Susqueahanna Quarterly (www.susquehannaquarterly.org), an online journal for formal and metrical poetry. He has published nothing in the last 30 years, but in his youth received two awards from the Academy of American Poets and one from Atlantic Monthly. New work will appear in the upcoming Fulcrum annual. He lives on Cape Cod.