Short Flights

Chapter 3: SAT EST VIXISSE.

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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.

SAT EST VIXISSE.

I.

To have lived!

To have felt a quickened beat

Of the heart in spring;

To have known that something sweet

Moved the birds to sing;

To have seen dim waves of heat

O’er a field of green retreat!

II.

To have found the hiding-place

Of the wild wood rose;

To have held, a little space,

Any flower that grows;

To have known a moment’s grace

Looking in a loved one’s face

To have lived, to have lived!

III.

Still, doth it suffice alone

That the world is fair?

O’er what fields have these hands sown?

Are they gold or bare?

And though all the flowers are flown,

If to God my heart is known,

Then shall I in truth be shown

How to live, why to live!