Summer Solstice

   Cottages are biscuits in the oven sun. There we were on the hill looking at egg washed homes and homeless men and women, the family of man, with bright yellow orange outlines. There was a swath of auburn hair on my shoulder painting me with her slumber. I felt the lazy day envelope me as her breathing lulled the wind into serenity. Such tranquil twilight in the setting sun, and the homeless all retreated into their cottages like birds in an old fashioned clock.

   I looked down at the pauper on my shoulder and her beaded head sang to me a song of life. I let the pages of my mind flip in the breeze and saw the words I had heard before.

 

I let the earth turn on an axis somewhere far away and with it did sway.

Unfit like an earthen cog a tear drop in the earthen grog.

I drink deep the love of life, the love of man, and think yet deeper.

Let this stew of grime and crime and wasted time

eat away at disconnection

grow a new infection.

So that I may surrender to so strong a shifting sand,

and never reach for a helping hand.

 

   I saw the tongue of Holy Beauty and it’s articulations verse by verse. I saw man struggling to sleep while he walked, he carried rocks on his back, and a snake in his ear. I saw him from where I sat, as the sun set. His stubborn puerile legs blasphemed against his search for quiescent repose and he collapsed where he stood. I let his struggle against his own humanity reach me and I pitied him.

   Is it not better to let gravity win and pull us closer together, and away from ourselves? There was a beggar on my shoulder sleeping in the chambers of my heart and she was part of us all. Some how, it always seems, the summer finds a way to bring the sun closer to me, and she was my sun. And so on this day there was a solstice of humanity before my very eyes and as I shouldered love and humanity and saw myself in the great story of the world it seemed as if I was weightless, I could touch the sun, and she shone His light on me.

 

Amen

Reviews

[just rose.]

The lyricism in this is brilliant. It reminds me of the Book of Revelation, but with a sense of deep and benevolent dream.

[Constance-Outspoken]

This is a delight to read, easy on the senses. "Is it not better to let gravity win and pull us closer together, and away from ourselves?" Such wise and poignant words. The entire piece reads like a dream from someplace so much better than this world we call home. Nice way to use the title, too. :)

[Bette]

i love this your words are like a poem smooth and rhythmic well done!