Poem for the End of Summer

Where are you?

A cricket cries

Again and again

Under the light

Of the waxing moon

Over here

Comes the
Irregular reply

From the edge of

My perceptual field

Above the fan's
Whoosh and whir
Ever so faintly I feel
The heavens wheeling

The still point

Of the turning world

Is turning still

Every cycle and season

Has beginning middle and end

Every something becomes

Nothing and soon enough

Becomes something again
Over parsecs and eons
Of continual forgetting

Nature's First and Last Green is Golden

Nature's first and last green is gold

The hue to which all life is beholden

With eyes open or closed the warmth

Within and without unfolds

From seed to flower to sheaf

Howsoever it may seem brief

We are transported beyond

The confines of a single season

As from dawn to dusk to dawn

It is gold alone that endures

Vincent van Gogh, Soir d'été, 1888.

This poem is in reply to Robert Frost's poem which I have copied below.  Much as I admire Frost's poem I think he rather misses the point, which Van Gogh captured on a summer night altogether much more clearly.

Nature’s first green is gold

Her hardest hue to hold

Her early leaf’s a flower

But only so an hour

Then leaf subsides to leaf

So Eden sank to grief

So dawn goes down to day

Nothing gold can stay