Contested

Male prowess takes many forms
and its sturdy competitive process
is a longitudinal study in the arcane
art of achievement superiority. From
the budding challenge of spitting
distance to the boastful arc of urine
eliciting wildly admiring cheers, to
the civil challenge of skipping stones
over water, sharp-shooting and lifting
weights, all contests that track the
male psyche from infant to manhood,
callow youth to the mature responsibility
of the family man; from the task-ridden
householder comes the plaint of
fall-fatigued nuisance, the ritual of
leaf-raking. From the ridiculous to the
sublime, but mostly absurd; overhead
the claim by one neighbour of bagging
nine for the detritus fallen from his
mature maple; the other, of two bags,
fully-packed, from his own old pine,
every time the winds blow dead needles
and all year around, mind you now.

Lament For Summer

Gone the probing shafts of dawn's
early light gently introducing the
promised warmth and beauty of
another summer glorious day. Gone
too, the lilting birdsong exuberantly
meeting the flush of daylight hours.

Memory and longing tuck away
the fragrance of heritage blooms, the
exquisite loveliness of petals folding,
overlapping and enfolding, silken
and complex colours and shades
defying nature's painterly brush.

Faded, all, lapsed into stale and
desiccated remnants of the intense
glories of shape, texture, fragrance,
colour and abundant sublimity they
once were prided for. Gone, and we,
forlorn, their memory dimly recalled.

Now, the sky clamps its dark lid early
on these cold fall days, and we mourn.
Gone, the summer warmth and light,
airy breezes. Gone the joys of spontaneity
of movement. Faded the flowers, bare the
trees, and fled the songbirds, butterflies,
leaving our world a wan, leaner place.

Lest We Forget

Nature herself, moved by the commemorative ceremonies scrupulously mounted year after year themed to "Lest We Forget", seems always to have committed her creatures of the atmosphere in a kindly demonstration of unity in respectful memory. The vile outcomes of wars that bring nations to counter the odious plans of self-aggrandizing tyrants to compel their destructive visions of triumphantly ruling affairs on an aghast and unwilling world community result in dire, near-Apocalyptic upheaval. In the full metal-jacket clash of the liberal democracies against the totalitarian barbarian-minded, civilization itself is horribly maimed like the minds and bodies of war's hapless victims. Our soldiers' valour recalled long after their loved ones last bade them farewell. Barbarity is practised and it is visited upon the helpless, civilian non-combatants with only their dignity and humanity shielding them from harm; frail protection from the destroying, looting, raping hordes whom fear and hatred has loosed from human respect and decency. On this day, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the eleventh year of the 21st Century, we remember, we pay silent tribute, we give hushed thanks. And Nature too, was moved to turn the sun behind a dark, mourning screen of chill brooding winter cloud.

Then, And Now

All those lingering years
we shared ourselves
frankly, sweetly, intimately
with one another. Hard to tell
now where you begin and I
leave off. A brace of
smooth-faced children then,
and now the years leap
beyond themselves; we still here,
fused in a covenant of
Biblical convention
beyond three-score-and-ten,
living testimony that
familiarity breeds
contentment.

Gracelessly

This is an arrogantly presumptuous
rock upon which we live, constantly
turning its face from the eye of its sun
as like a stubborn child furtively
spurning a parent's guiding hand of
frustrated concern for a willful
offspring's safety, security, well-being.

While the sun, mothering its reluctant
planet, may shrug in resignation,
we creatures of nature, cyclically
deprived of warmth and comfort must
resign ourselves to that hope that
springs eternal beckoning the future.

As we prepare for the cold distance of
a winter aspect by reaping crops of the
Earth's surface, and dredge energy from
the Earth's core ... depleting resources,
we chide our source that through its
negligence we have scant other option.

Or so it so often seems. Yet this nature
of our sun-kissed planet merely exists,
indifferent to our dismay; our accidental
host, owing us no courtesies whatever.
Even so, tolerating us, permitting us to
make use of its vast treasures, and we do.

Peanut Panjandrums

They are ever more gradually
identifying themselves as individuals,
the exuberant crowds of squirrels
that laud our exemplary behaviour
traipsing daily within their forest enclaves,
where we daily, guiltlessly, trespass.
Not the beavers, the muskrats, the
hawks and woodpeckers, but others.

We have yet to distinguish the black
mobster-crows who also recognize our
presence, fully cognizant and aware of
all the tempting caches deposited for the
pleasure of chickadees, squirrels,
chipmunks. And, evidently, advantage
seeking and possessive crows.

We witness the confidence of the
chipmunks and their clever habits,
their lightning raids and furtively
hidden treasures. The impudent
scolding of red squirrels and their
transgressive jealousies. The timid and
the courageous; their competitive mettle.

Two black tailless squirrels bravely
accustomed to confronting us directly
for their awards; Stumpy and Stumpette.
Two glossy, brush-tailed blacks, present
as Tweedledee and Tweedledum on the hunt
as a brace. The greys, supremely coiffed;
madame et monsieur. We imagine, and why
not, we are to them peanut panjandrums.