End of Days—Romance and Elegy for the Sixth Extinction
September stirs the poignancy of beauty and wilt.
The shy pinks, robust reds of earlier seasons, turn to
luminescent gold and crimson, russet and ochre.
Then the rustle of straw and browning. Decay and farewell
pinch nostrils.
Yet the fresh and quickening winds bloom on cheeks, arms seek
woollens. We are blessed to own the things that defy the chill.
As decades slip by we are surprised at the end-of-season, end-of-days
analogy. Now our present world omens a deeper end-of –days.
The climate, once a cornucopia of wise sayings, has become unpredictable.
Cities flood, forests burn, fish flounder, seas rise. Time to take warning.
Like aging humans we are caught amazed as the familiar disappears.
Bodies reflect the wear of seasons, minds try to absorb the implications
of a hostile world. A history of human folly begins to be written.
The information age, instead of freeing all our good instincts to better
the world, is bogged down in pettiness, politics, misguided greed.
Is there still an Equinox?
As we stand between sun and moon at the crucial hour, will we help
the planet turn into a golden renaissance era or the nemesis of wipe-out,
die-out and replacement. A repeat of the Permian clean slate of all life,
a sixth extinction wrought by human failure.
Katherine L. Gordon
epic September 2016.
Skeletons In Moon-Rise
At moon-rise a radiating sphere of golden light
appeared on the pine floor
like a sudden sand-dune beneath the prim pane,
exotic in a Protestant valley.
I ventured bare feet into it
absorbed the unexpected tingle of light
shocked to see that bones shone
through the now transparent skin.
I knew my skeleton self...
that all soft flesh covers a secret:
eternity of bare bone
the price of trying to briefly catch the light.
Katherine L. Gordon
September, 2016
September stirs the poignancy of beauty and wilt.
The shy pinks, robust reds of earlier seasons, turn to
luminescent gold and crimson, russet and ochre.
Then the rustle of straw and browning. Decay and farewell
pinch nostrils.
Yet the fresh and quickening winds bloom on cheeks, arms seek
woollens. We are blessed to own the things that defy the chill.
As decades slip by we are surprised at the end-of-season, end-of-days
analogy. Now our present world omens a deeper end-of –days.
The climate, once a cornucopia of wise sayings, has become unpredictable.
Cities flood, forests burn, fish flounder, seas rise. Time to take warning.
Like aging humans we are caught amazed as the familiar disappears.
Bodies reflect the wear of seasons, minds try to absorb the implications
of a hostile world. A history of human folly begins to be written.
The information age, instead of freeing all our good instincts to better
the world, is bogged down in pettiness, politics, misguided greed.
Is there still an Equinox?
As we stand between sun and moon at the crucial hour, will we help
the planet turn into a golden renaissance era or the nemesis of wipe-out,
die-out and replacement. A repeat of the Permian clean slate of all life,
a sixth extinction wrought by human failure.
Katherine L. Gordon
epic September 2016.
Skeletons In Moon-Rise
At moon-rise a radiating sphere of golden light
appeared on the pine floor
like a sudden sand-dune beneath the prim pane,
exotic in a Protestant valley.
I ventured bare feet into it
absorbed the unexpected tingle of light
shocked to see that bones shone
through the now transparent skin.
I knew my skeleton self...
that all soft flesh covers a secret:
eternity of bare bone
the price of trying to briefly catch the light.
Katherine L. Gordon
September, 2016
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