Poets Declare Life's Fragility

"How fragile is life in nature's forceful wind..." Dylan Thomas wrote of October gales and their harsh, buffeting 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 me. But when the trees bow down their heads, the wind is passing by." Shakespeare spoke to hazing 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 allow nature's force tatter the tangled trammels they tenaciously spin. Dandelions, awash in golden hues, does the wind whisper, "Prepare yourself to fly with me on a magical flight?" You are a delicate dreamer, the wind, a wily schemer. It'll blast your blooms with blustery swirls and sweep your seed tufts away with gusts. Percy Shelley composed an ode in which he labeled the wind an "impulsive destroyer," His thoughts are maudlin but true. I have qualms over such trivial things, painfully aware that there is little I can do. I fret and frown as snowflakes melt when its misfortune settles it on my cheek, tumbling to its demise when it touches me. It stirs withing me a sense of melancholia... A gentle word that should be whispered but the wind has no compassion for gentility. "Come, come, thou bleak December wind, and blow the dry leaves from the tree!" Coleridge called out, but to him wind signaled death. The breath of taunting tempests takes many lives, not just dangling leaves torn off in a breeze. I wept like a child of four when a butterfly I found lay dead upon the ground. 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 sorrowful thoughts thrive in the dark. Yeats penned the lines, "What need have you to dread the monstrous crying of wind?" My rebuttal to that fine poet would be... "What need has the wind to judge what lives or dies?" And once again I'm forced to realize... How fragile is life in nature's forceful wind.