“The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

Moments of the past do not last
kicked into the long grass
of a warm, early-summer’s day.

Gold petals
gleam
for God’s sake!

Stormy-autumn prefigures
flurries of snow
eaten by body heat;
silky snow frosting
tumbling-heaps of red, gold, brown
that crisp-crackle underfoot
in Buchenwald, Weimar,
where Goethe once ruled.

Now old fools lose their threads
in fogs
where pot-heads, fragile, thin,
amply fill the skin they're in.

Mornings echo with savage-silent-dread
memories-lost, storm-tossed within my head
Look! dust-motes float
amongst the dead
like gossamer,
like spiders' webs
glittering in the rain
like words thought, but never said,
misrule-misled, instead.

In the eye of the storm
a moment of calm,
do no harm, and then, do no harm.

Young-ghosts, finally-fled,
in the very heart of the storm,
in my head,
I see chapped, red-raw hands
dirt ingrained
from working the fields
storm-sent, soil-scented winds
blow me back to kingdom-come,
lost-time’s silently beating drum.