The winds of change
are blowing a gale,
rattling my old sash window frame,
and a draft is sneaking past
the sleepy door snake
guarding my humble parlour.
A wayward leaf,
its short life spent,
flutters against the window pane —
a timely reminder that
like most things in this life,
this sojourn, too, shall pass.
. In the touch of the air on my skin
and in the strange — yet somehow familiar —
smell of freshly turned earth,
I sense the call of my beloved
Heartland, beckoning to me; whispering,
like Rumi: “Come, come, whoever you are.”
Perhaps if I were younger
I'd pull on my coat and scarf
and set out to meet my fate.
Instead, I put on another log
and curl up by the hearth
to finish another page in my storybook.
I've arrived at the age, you see,
when little is guaranteed any more,
and so at the end of each day
I like to tie up any loose ends
in case my feeble grip on life is lost
and I don't awaken again with the new dawn.
“Once upon a time,” I'd begun, long ago,
“not a thousand miles from here ...”
Those words — about the young fool —
this old fool knows by heart.
But as for the elusive “happily ever after”,
that is an ever more distant borrowed promise.
“Hope is born of lack of hope,”
a quiet inner voice reminds me,
adding: “Intense hope leads easily to fear
that the hope may not be realised.”
On that note, the pen slips from my fingers
and I drift off toward the Land of Nod.
Blessèd Eugenie is waiting for me there
as I cross the narrow Cinvat bridge.
“You are not an old fool,” my Fravarti insists,
clearly privy to my deepest, darkest thoughts.
“And for you, real life has only just begun,”
she gently chides me, as she leads me on.
~ ET. Yorkshire, England, © Thursday 23 September 2021.
Image: Autumn Leaves.
Image author: Masaki Ikeda (Wikimedia user 池田正樹)
Image source: Wikimedia Commons.
Image licence: Public domain.
