Only Human

sabbath

Time is most itself when passing.

So bees wend high above the road
Where a fine dust cloud rises
And white birds appear in the gathered green.
No painter here to take their wing to canvas,
No inscrutable simplicity in a Buddha's cluttered mime,
No poet giving voice to mute mud,
No philosophic sap, swollen knot of superadded wisdom,
Nor a Christ lodged in the slowing green snail . . .

Such are limp hands white with sleep,
Hair as water burns on golden sand,
Or wooden dark in its stillness.

It be the blaze of afternoon brings the heat of world,
Listing here on slight breezes, where
Over your radiant slumbers sugar cypress arms
Canopy my nodding vigil.
Invisible breath: guardian of our present
Steals through infant lips, of a new old world,
Secretly to stir the leaves around.

Time is most itself when passing.