Refrain
By Sarah Winter - Kansas City, Missouri, USA - 12 February 2016
Suddenly the face of the earth is pale, though all
the scenes remain the same. Along the hills
the dust still blind and white beside the furrow,
beside the trees my shade is blue and thin.
But yet the oak now dances as if it cannot
cease, its hiss and struggle now fatigued.
The music, though it plays, goes sharp. I feel,
I feel that I have said all this before,
like groves who quote the standard lines each spring
and every fall their tongues turn pale again
and drop into a stanza marked in soil.
It is not new: the dying no surprise.
The earth is tired of her refrain, the dying
and the waiting for another rebirth.