Reminiscence of Summer (For Maxine Grace Hylton)

Before that day splashed everything with light I played in solitude with cuddly clouds And watched them form changing figures, blight The sky or bring the sobbing sludge of rain, Or etch your portrait where the spindly sparrow fly looping your beauty with the breathless sun We watched them fall like shattered diamonds once from a window battered with fragile dreams of tomorrow And you said they were our prancing children in the water Little Shangos you called them, and we kissed In passion, filling love with lissom lilacs of laughter For life was an eternal summer then Winter was barred from where it had never been Barren landscape scarred by the lecher, not the sun Shrivelling petals and prayers, lynching the hearts like trees Barren and scraggy shredding the eye Brambled fingers clutching sky Tolling voids of air like a crucifix Self important because of the importunate Castling citadels of calamity against the hearts fear The wind exploits the calamity of leaves Only a shell of sultry shadows was left And I bereft Tented my exultation To wait your coming again And the annihilation of pain. Clouds are drifters of the sky, I am enfolded in cerulean blue Dark indigo of heart on the promenade Children feet splashing the frazzled dry of sand I shriek like a gull slant against the wind Where the splashed sand grits the eye Summer seas are all of winter's tears rinsed in light Itinerant birds frolic here: innocence excited emits delight, For lovers are children Too trusting uncarefully Undermarcated wrong or right As summer splash them like sprays Glinting the eye Where the starving eagle plays' I slant away to reminisce alone.