The Human Seasons: Elements At War and Peace, Part Iv

4. Each dawn, the cold steps back a pace, And in the lengthening light the tender green steals up Through the retreating ice and snow As the lands rise fresh and free from the deathlike sleep again, To play the full young mother dressed out in life itself, Strolling through the warming, waxing sun. Growth and generation give the lie To the empty time so short before Everything renewed proclaims its exoneration from stasis And beauty runs riot, freed from its long waiting To declare its immortality again. And for he and she love grows anew In the hopes reborn in the spring's thaw The heart's slow healing gathers force with the blooming As they pull the threads of their lives back together, Sewing them closer with trust and forgiveness, Going on again in the thousand-odd ways That make a single life of two. Love trumpets again its smug triumph Through the wakening world, For it too is one of the old, strong forces, The one that holds together what would fain break itself apart To its own rack and ruin; The ultimate surgeon, Healing with slow steely cuts Cauterizing the strangely sweet wells of pain With unquenchable fire That burns, Promethean.