Short Flights

Chapter 2: TO THE SEASONS.

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About This Book

The collection gathers short lyrical poems and sonnets that meditate on seasonal change, love and its vicissitudes, friendship and parting, aspiration and disappointment, and quiet domestic and natural scenes. Many pieces favor intimate first-person reflection, blending pastoral imagery—gardens, birds, waves, and twilight—with moral and spiritual concerns about faith, striving, and memory. Varied short forms, occasional rondeau and sonnet sequences, produce compact musicality and a tone alternating between wistfulness and gentle affirmation, while recurring motifs of journey, secret longing, and consolation knit the individual lyrics into a unified contemplative arc.

TO THE SEASONS.

SEASONS that pass me by in varied mood,

As on the impressionable land you leave a trace,

Molding sometime a delicate flower’s sweet face,

Touching again with green the somber wood,

Or drawing all beneath a snowy hood,—

Am I not worthy as they to have a place

In your remembrance? Am I made too base

To know what weed and thorn have understood?

Fair vernal time, I need your quickening

Even as the sleeping Earth! O summer heat

Make flower and fruit in me that I may bring

Full hands to Autumn when above me beat

The serious winds; and Winter, make me strong

Like the glad music of your battle song!