ELEVEN LAST SONGS  (I -  VI)

i.

Vernal Hymn                                                       after Hermann Hesse (1877-1962)

‘Neath winter’s dusky crypt

Dreamt I e’er long

Of thy perfumèd woods, thy winds blue-dipped

In heav’n, thy birds all sweet a’song.

Now liest thou revealed,

O’er-flowed with light,

In glist’ning swards manteel’d...

O wondrous to the sight!

Thou knowest me afresh,

Thou lurest me

So tenderly that all this quiv’ring flesh

Doth sing thy blessèd mystery!

ii.

Spring

From gloaming tombs and caverns, long, so long

I’ve dreamt — of all your woods, those arborous vaults

of soft cerulean breezes; all your airs

and verdant fragrances; your avian choirs.

And now, unveiled to me at last, you lie

in glimmering array; all fresh adorned

with luminosities; bespilled before

my awe-struck eyes like lustrous miracles.

Once more, in fondling glance, you recognize

and beckon me with such sweet gentle lures

that all my piths and limbs now tremble deep

within your nearness — teeming, rapt, divine!

iii.

Season “X”

buried in shadows cast by empty suns

i spent whole worlds of dream

in your blue-aired ghost forests

of twittering redolences

but now i wake up open in your real body

your infinitude of sparkles

flooding my soul’s eyes

like weird prodigies scurrying everywhere

and you already know that i know

that your green wooing feathers tickle me

from the inside of my head

as i vibrate wholly into your blossomings

iv.

Ye Thirty Days . . .                                              after Hermann Hesse

The garden mourns; her cooling tears

Rain fresh and deep on wilting flow’rs;

And summer, rapt in quiet fears

Now shudders toward her final hours.

Meand’ring leaves flit golden down

from tall acacias, one by one.

And summer smiles ‘neath quiet crown;

Her gardens dreaming deaths begun.

Still ling’ring by the roses’ bed

She pines e’er long for peaceful rest —

To close her weary eyes o’erspread

With blessèd sleep at last posses’d.

v.

September

The garden mourns;

cool sinks the rain into her flowers.

Summertime now shudders

in the quietude of her completion.

Golden drops of leaf after leaf

drip slowly down acacia boughs.

And Summer smiles, bewildered, drained,

within the garden’s wondrous dream of death

Yet long she tarries still, near quiet roses,

yearning for tranquility, repose.

And languidly she closes

her wide, ever-too-weary eyes.

vi.

Seventh (Now Ninth) Month

horticultured lamentation

reaching rains’ cool flower piths of

summer-sucked shivering equinoxes

ending ends of sad mute (-ations)

lateral pinnate outgrowths from a stem

all yellow fall and fall and

smiling haggard trees flip out

from dreams where everybody kills them

hanging on from rose thorn shibboleth

forever wills the willful narcolepsies

but the slowly slowing big fat eyes

close off to far-botanic pseudo death (s).

(continued...)

- Jason Wingate

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