summer's halt

   The sky has been many things: a drum, a promise,

a cloth pinned across a wooden frame that calls itself humanity’s end

and the beginning of the universe:

   a reflection that we are owed nothing.

Then, in summer, colours awake like question marks in flight:

   we wait in walled gardens, on islands,

      that have us drunkenly wishing, in the warmth,

on the sky to be an oracle.

   The dusk, the twilight, the sunset remind,

that the sky cannot be everything:

   but it gives, and gives, and gives to us-

in the evening when the tips of flowers are sultry orange,

and the roots languish in an early midnight -

life when summer’s fingers pinch, to a stop, the turning clock.

© Mollie Mardel