Short Flights

Chapter 7: SONG.

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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.

SONG.

GLAD and sad make rhyme, my dear,

Glad and sad make rhyme.

Though the sun may not appear,

Though there be a time

When the hours are very long,

And there is no joy for you,

Weave this thought into a song:

Glad and sad make jingle true—

Happy jingle true!

They are joined together, dear,

Joined together they,

Like the dark sky and the clear

Of an April day.

Like the grief that dies in gladness

Turmoil into peace will grow,

Soon there is an end of sadness—

Glad and sad make rhyme, you know,

Perfect rhyme, you know.

They make perfect rhyme, my dear.

Perfect as can be;

Falling sweet upon the ear,

Telling you and me

That the thorn and rose are wed,

That night holds in store the dawn,

And till hope and trust are dead

Glad and sad will jingle on,

Jingle, jingle on!