Can I Remember Spring?

The monarch, for a moment, rests
Beside the robins empty nest
Fanning its multi-colored wings.
I wonder. Does it remember Spring?

Suddenly, it flutters away
To southern lands and warmer days
Followed by geese in arrowed vee's
As Autumn begins painting leaves.

Winter comes, the wind whispers low
The land will soon be covered with snow
And in the woods, where birds flew singing
There's only the silence of trees, dreaming.

All things succumb to changing seasons
As now when the flame of passion
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not
On embers of things learned, things taught.

 
               Family of Man

Now comes the time of autumn leaves
Bright bursts of color from the trees
And final blooms before the frost
As thoughts turn to things won and lost.

As I walk among the shadows
A cool, puckish wind tugs and blows,
A child filled with jubilation
Filling me with sweet elation.

It whispers to me in soft rhyme,
Of life's many celebrations
Of how lives touch one another.
The mysteries of harvest time,
Those subtle, unseen connections
That makes us brothers and sisters.