Fragile Is Life

"Life is fragile and temporary. The faces of today quickly become the faces of the past. Sorrow, pain, and anger... it all fades, except love. Love is forever and there after, even when we've fallen to our graves." ~ Lee Argus "How fragile is life in nature's forceful wind..." Dylan Thomas wrote of October winds and their punishing frosty fingers. He called them an "autumnal spell." Autumn...the season when leaves hang trembling. Christina Rosetti's lines have been well read.. "Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor I. But when the trees bow down their heads, the wind is passing by." Shakespeare spoke to zephers, "Blow, blow," he wrote, declaring their breath to be not as rude as man's, but in my observances, I find them circumspect with crude treatment of many fragile things. Spiders weave gossamer webs to rival Chantilly lace in labyrinthine patterns, with lengths of silver thread. Tiny arachnids, do not let nature's force tatter the tangled trammels you tenaciously spin. Dandelions, awash in golden petals, does the wind whisper, "Prepare yourself to fly with me on a magical flight?" You, the delicate dreamer... the wind, a wily schemer. He'll pluck your blooms with blustery swirls and sweep your seed tufts away with gusts and puffs. Percy Shelley composed an ode in which he labeled the wind an "impulsive destroyer," His thoughts are sad but true. I worry over such trivial things, painfully aware that there is little I can do. I frown as a snowflake melts when its misfortune is to settle on my cheek. Tumbled from the sky to its demise when it touches me. There's a word for my melancholia... whispered with a smile ~ a m b e d o ~ A gentle word that's not allowed to float upon the wind. "Come, come, thou bleak December wind, and blow the dry leaves from the tree!" Coleridge called out, but to him it signaled death. The breath of gales takes many lives; not just leaves, but the bird and the butterfly. I wept like a child of four when a butterfly I found lay dead upon the ground, and I think it quite profound that a creature whose name ends in 'fly' is killed when it tries to aviate as it was meant to do. In such moments, I realize how hard it is for them to survive and sorrow finds a shadowed place deep within my heart where too often it thrives in the dark. Yeats penned the lines, "What need have you to dread the monstrous crying of wind?" My rebuttal would be... "What need has the wind to judge what lives or dies?" And once again I realize... How fragile is life in nature's forceful wind. November 3, 2020 Ambedo Poetry Contest Sponsored by: Silent One