Love's Survival

The blind fingertips of longing
feel for the edge of summer as it
slips away over the roller time winds
the days on to the music of the cicada,
the fellow with the rasping voice
who saws the hush of evening into
fragments from his perch in the
poplar trees, as lovers stretch
hands across lonely boundaries
that divide the country of identity.
                    Stone sentences written
across berry-rich land can be erased
in one breath of annunciation, eyes have
seen feathery branches rocket into leaf
from the memory of a bare tree, and wide
margins of air defy emptiness with one
bird winging north and love? Well,
love may face itself in a reflection
of earth to learn how a root survives
the season.