Like A Windmill Poem by Robert Rorabeck

How they turn golden, sometimes little boys,
Others old men,
Stretch from their graves into eternity, their theories etched into
Papyrus read forever,
Echoed into the classrooms of other planets,
Spread out in lecture halls, scrutinized, worshipped,
And mimicked,
Decathletes for their seasons of breathing go on running
After the sun is down, after the housewives have returned,
After even their children have passed on in infinite
Cessation,
Those blessed men, the silky authors of their fate the stars
Caressed and queens knighted, to whom mortality
Is a pet always cherub and perfumed, led around when
The thought requires,
But to these honored few, exhumed every morning, stone is
Not immortal, and the sky is lowered to a ceiling
Their fingertips brush, and in each county they come
Welcomed and fed,
Perpetuating a rosy garden where women casually romance
Them, preferred to their husbands,
Or if not read, put away into hibernation only to bloom forthright
When rediscovered,
Or never discovered again,
And left to the earthen echoes of us all,
but for their time elegant gentlemen,
Showing their anatomy to scientists and dreamers,
Cheering for Olympians and taking prodigious notations,
And when the book is closed, lying down,
Praying selfishly for truer forms to extend themselves,
To sneak up to the roof of this house and cry seeming to be alone,
But the elements pricking them, awakening the hidden thoughts,
The epitaphs which conclude their bright séances,
As they ladle from the great unseen gyre supporting us all,
Turning like a clock, like a hurricane, like a windmill.