End of Summer

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1

it happened
where

              it was so sudden;
to think how quickly we found ourselves
       in amongst the fallen leaves,
faded idols of September,
a stumbling newcomer to an approaching winter
for we knew the heat of day; but there was no way
       of knowing the signal that marked the end of summer,
or the coming chill of going one way
as opposed to the other;

               -- and there we were:
lovers caught in hesitancy;
solemn puppets in mock animation,
neither moving nor still,
       but held dangling in mimicry of a greater puppeteer,
against a painted backdrop over
clouds unmoving locked to frayed trail-roads
binding ghostly blues and greys
to shredded blood-red ribbons,
tying up the inevitable dying weather
in a cooling colour of autumn
to blink out like a misty mire
leading astray the lost traveller;

it happened
like this, before the quiet rains came,
       and though all fickle rain is gentle at first;
it ever increases its own concentrated drops
of history to intermingle with our own;
Nature's erasing form pushing us to move on
or else drown disowned,

but Love never dies, and is never really owned,
it merely changes, and moves its connection
through one to another,
when it ignites in us
to leave burnt out reproductions,
we still reach out
to fire up the very wire in us
               -- when we can never tell
when fires lit heedlessly
will die out;

we light our own fires
in the nights waiting
for a truer fire
to burn; but when the fires we build
for ourselves are poorly done,
what makes us believe
love will come again?

2

and each of us grow afraid;
       not a concious fear that
resounds deeply
in the double meaning
of the silence of the night,
but an underhand fight

with the fear
that the love of another will change
the other in us, in ways we cannot understand;
       not a conscientious fear of
survival that sounds
out its name, but deceptively gentle,

working on the weakness of shame, and
reasoned away in the work of
those less than brave;
each of us made lame;

               -- and there we stopped on lovers lane;
but we were still afraid,
caught by the deputy of our fear

to feed us the greatest lie
we shall ever live by;
that to change is to die;

-- and although sometimes we furnaced love
with our own futilities,
its reckless flame could still scatter
away the shadows to unveil the night;

or where love ignited like rising sunlight
over our naked bodies; a soliloquy scarring history
of our skin, and what it writes within,
of the end of summer
and what it brings.

Published 1 June, 2026

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