David MurphySeason’s Chimes
It’s inadequate, the sounding chime,
to convey the sundry dawns and dusks
that rise and fall like crops of flowers,
and seasons that stock and sap the bowers,
and fields aging from seed to fruit to husk:
these many great and small cycles of time.
The Earth
Our globe has more than mere water and land.
It has more than caps and boots of white snow,
more than a snaking navy cloak of sea,
more than a tawny belt of desert sand,
more than just gusts that the hidden wind blows,
and more than all the grass in a prairie.
For even when fire strips grass from prairie—
blackening the miles of once-golden land,
with ash swept as far as the hot wind blows—
even when spring’s buds are coated in snow,
and even when rich valleys turn to sand,
there is more potential in soil and sea.
There is regeneration. Sky to sea,
grass to ash, bones to dust: the wild prairie,
the austere mountains, and the humble sands
all change and renew as biomes of land.
The process is cold, delicate as snow,
and whirls through seasons just as the wind blows.
What will be from what has come. The old blows
of time, and the future we cannot see
together form renewal: a clean snow
that covers death in the wood and prairie,
leaves reviving water in thirsty land,
and brings tendrils from an infertile sand.
So even from unfruitful waste—the sand—
from pole to pole, so far as the wind blows,
each season breathes new life into the land.
Reefs made of dead oysters grow undersea,
while, on shore, fire revives the prairie,
and tundra is insulated by snow.
Ice ages come and cover Earth in snow.
Then time passes. Frost melts. Lakes become sand.
New species inhabit epic prairies.
And still, time passes. Winnowing winds blow.
Shorelines change, and bays are lost to the sea.
The treeless field becomes a wooded land.
So. Ephemeral are prairie and snow,
like shadows from land, like moisture from sand,
like a wind that blows the spray from the sea.
There’s deceitful beauty where trees grow twisty
In a somber forest that’s shadowed and misty
Where light shines through in arrowlike shafts
And leaves stir faintly from gentle drafts.
There in a clearing stands a crystal bell jar
With a red rose inside that glows like a star.
For centuries not a single petal has fallen—
Neither in snowy seasons nor times of spring’s pollen.
Young trees around it have grown old and died,
Yet the rose has not wilted, faded, or dried.
Deathless, perpetual, unfading, enduring:
Without change, the rose has no chance of maturing.
When the final sand falls through the glass,
And the land beyond yonder lies waiting,
They’ll count up your money, your exhibitions of class,
And the times you’ve left someone hating.
They’ll measure your life inside of their heads,
With an ounce of forgiveness or two,
Then leave you with the many dead
And compare some of them against you.
And there you will lay
Until no one recalls
How you met every day
And recovered from falls.
So it stands to good reason
That because time always forgets
We must value our own season
Before we descend to the pits.
Music in Winter is a rhyming poem that was written just after The Arrival of Autumn.
It’s written about a young couple who are in love and who are walking on a cold, dark beach. The stars are out. The clouds are scudding in front of the moon. The couple’s feet are bare. The rhyme scheme is abab.
In winter, along the grey and green northwestern shore,
the freezing ocean draws its briny waves and bubbling foam
over beach crabs, Nautilus shells, and the crow-combed floor
as the sun sets beyond the sea into her western home.
Then the stars come out. One by one, they start to appear.
They are like lighthouses in the cold, black galaxies of space,
each with a message that says, Here, there are planets here,
circling round and round, far away, revolving round a fiery base.
And then, floating up from the water, comes the crescent moon,
scythe-like, Arabesque, swathed by scudding silver clouds,
and blinking behind a raven who flies, witchlike, through the woven gloom,
through winds whose warp and weft are the cloth of night’s dark shrouds.
In the midst of this a couple wander onto the sands.
They are lit by moonlight. Her hair is long; their feet are bare.
They walk like lovers and intertwine their hands.
They stop at sea’s edge and breathe the salty air.
It is a dark, cold night. A vagrant cloud covers the moon.
Not a light, not a lamp, not a glow can be seen.
The music of the ocean’s combers is an ancient tune.
The rustling of the firs lends woodwinds to the night’s song,
while the girl adds vocals to the primordial, ancient endeavor,
singing into the wind, into the wilderness, into the wild, high and strong,
a song that lasts a moment, with notes that last forever.
