TO LIVE AGAIN

You heard the lark above the waking corn
and felt on the ear the lulling drone of insects
passing across the air, born by the breeze
The sounds and loves that yesterday held enduring
and carried forward searching the wind into the night.

You smelled the roses nodding on the fence
Holding forever their fragrance in the long summer days
And you have often sampled since
the same strange delight, passing swiftly
but savoured sadly while it lasted.

You lay on the cool shadowed grass
Searching for four-leaved clover elusive as treasure
Long-lost in the common multitude of grasses
Like the dawn of creation when the earth
was guilded for no purpose but for God
Until a man walked through the green lush pasture
And saw for the first time the great design
of beauty underneath the shadows.

The broad landscape is like heaven
Where the field's crazed network
sewed its celestial patchwork
Bluer at the edge and faded with the wear of years.

You are like the fields - green as grass
Your life is the patchwork and the blue is eternity
The grass dies only to live again
Born by the season's sorrow.