And Then

[rejectomorph]

The swift passing of the night reminds me of the swift passage of the month. The long-delayed season now rushes. In a few days, the dogwoods have gone from pink and white clouds to masses of green among which a few fading blossoms droop. Spiders spin webs everywhere, and these are quickly flecked with the dark dots of incautious insects, their translucent wings now stilled. Blades of grass here and there begin to turn brown, and the walk is littered with decayed camellias. The great heat is yet to arrive, but looms. Only recently greened, the landscape lies at the edge of shimmering desert, to be slowly sucked dry by the earlier rising sun. Night is a brief closing of the eyes, a singing of frogs and crickets, and then there is the sudden squawk of crows who appear from vanishing darkness like nocturnal fragments vainly protesting the rising of the sun. What has become of spring?



Sunday Verse

The Breath of Night

by Randall Jarrell


The moon rises. The red cubs rolling
In the ferns by the rotten oak
Stare over a marsh and a meadow
To the farm's white wisp of smoke.
A spark burns, high in heaven.
Deer thread the blossoming rows
Of the old orchard, rabbits
Hop by the well-curb. The cock crows
From the tree by the widow's walk;
Two stars in the trees to the west,
Are snared, and an owl's soft cry
Runs like a breath through the forest.
Here too, though death is hushed, though joy
Obscures, like night, their wars,
The beings of this world are swept
By the Strife that moves the stars