The Soul's Own Season

Measure time by calendars of men,

By frantic clocks that tick and strike, and then

Chide the soul for its unhurried pace,

Believing it is lost within the race.

But look beyond the haste, the anxious fret,

The bloom is on a schedule not yet met.

The stoic oak, to reach the heavens slow,

Endures a hundred winters in the snow,

And builds a strength within its silent grain

Unknown to poppies, drunk on sun and rain,

Who seize the summer with a fleeting fire,

And in a week, fulfill their whole desire.

One is not better; one is not undone.

It simply answer to a different sun.

Some flowers hoard their light for the moon

When it is high and lonely, they importune

The darkness with a scent so strange and deep,

While all the world, and all its judgment, sleep.

A sacred, shy, and solitary art—

To be a world unto a single heart,

To bloom unseen, a brief and silver queen,

And not to need the validation of the scene.

The patient river, with its steady ache,

Will carve a canyon for the water’s sake.

The light of some long-shattered, distant star,

Took patient ages to arrive where we are.

And in the earth, a diamond's violent grace

Is born of pressure in a lightless place.

Why would the soul, more vast than all of these,

Demand to grow with the simplicity of trees?

So let the winter be a sacred thing,

The fallow field where future harvests sleep.

Let silence be the soil from which one sing,

And treasure secrets that one choose to keep.

One is not late. One is not meant to be

Nobody’s timepiece, seems wild, and free.

Consider it’s arriving, in the time and space

The universe has written for any grace.