Sweet smell of phlox drifting across the lawn— <br />an early warning of the end of summer. <br />August is fading fast, and by September <br />the little purple flowers will all be gone. <br />Season, project, and vacation done. <br />One more year in everybody's life. <br />Add a notch to the old hunting knife <br />Time keeps testing with a horny thumb. <br />Over the summer months hung an unspoken <br />aura of urgency. In late July <br />galactic pulsings filled the midnight sky <br />like silent screaming, so that, strangely woken, <br />we looked at one another in the dark, <br />then at the milky magical debris <br />arcing across, dwarfing our meek mortality. <br />There were two ways to live: get on with work, <br />redeem the time, ignore the imminence <br />of cataclysm; or else take it slow, <br />be as tranquil as the neighbors' cow <br />we love to tickle through the barbed wire fence <br />(she paces through her days in massive innocence, <br />or, seeing green pastures, we imagine so). <br />In fact, not being cows, we have no choice. <br />Summer or winter, country, city, we <br />are prisoners from the start and automatically, <br />hemmed in, harangued by the one clamorous voice. <br />Not light but language shocks us out of sleep <br />ideas of doom transformed to meteors <br />we translate back to portents of the wars <br />looming above the nervous watch we keep.<br /><br />Rachel Hadas<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-end-of-summer-8/
