Poems for the Summer Solstice – # 2 in a Series – W.S. Merwin

American poet W.S. Merwin

Summer

Be of this brightness dyed
Whose unrecking fever
Flings gold before it goes
Into voids finally
That have no measure.

Bird-sleep, moonset,
Island after island,
Be of their hush
On this tide that balance
A time, for a time.

Islands are not forever,
Nor this light again,
Tide-set, brief summer,
Be of their secret
That fears no other.

W.S. Merwin, from The Drunk in the Furnace, and reprinted in Migration, New & Selected Poems, Copper Canyon Press, 2004.

This, my follow up to Barb Pelman’s poem I posted a few days ago. Another poem to celebrate the coming of summer, not its leaving! As Barb said in her poem quoting Canadian poet and poetry teacher without compare!, Patrick Lane: don’t leave before you leave. I will not mourn the daylight that grows shorter in summer days! And I appreciate today and every photon of daylight that lingers longer than it did yesterday!

Islands are not forever,
Nor this light again,
Tide-set, brief summer,
Be of their secret
That fears no other.

Nothing is forever. A cliche for sure. But not this poem for me. Ah, the secret of enjoying the now. In this moment of being: I chose not to fear any others!

A Sobering PS

This message is particularly apt for me today. Somae and I were going for an early celebratory coffee At Drumroasters’ Coffee in Cobble Hill this morning when we saw the results of an awful crash between a convertible and a motorcycle. The motorcycle was flung from the crash into the back of the car. Rescue crews were cleaning up the scene and we have no idea of the fate of the drivers. Because the wreckage blocked the north bound part of the intersection we couldn’t turn left for the coffee shop and we continued south on the highway.

A few minutes later we turned right at the next intersection and turned around to cross the highway and find our back-road way to the shop. As we waited at the intersection we heard the screaming of brakes  from a car coming south and suddenly saw a northbound car turning left in front of us incredibly fast, (missing by inches the car coming south on the highway). What a shock.

Did the northbound car see the road block in front of him and decide at the last minute to make the turn? Why didn’t he stop long before this or turn right? We all got lucky. God knows if we might have been involved in the accident from the force of a collision smashing the two cars against our car!

I am grateful for this day. For my life. I pray the drivers from the actual crash made it out alive and without life-changing injuries. If they didn’t I pray for their families.

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