Seasons Poem by john coldwell

Beneath the autumn sky's cold clouds of metal,
Wind chased shadows evict a last clinging petal
From it's exhausted home.
To live on the streets,
With the wheeling wasted leaves.
Unemployed, old and thin,
Youth's lustre now a wrinkled skin,
Awaiting only its last gathering in,
To heap the fires of winter

Have you seen the way a pear dies?
It's once firm flesh, brown blotched and prised
First by wasps and then by flies.
It falls unto the ground and sinks,
Beneath the ground it's flaccid carcass stinks.
It's just the way a human dies,
Unless by shriving fires rise,
In empty ashes to the skies.
A more dissolving death.

And this before the deepening winter's black,
Like bones of the back, stiffening branches crack,
That age has made so brittle.
Now the darkness closes in,
Your suffocating's weaknesses begin
The endless night of loss.
Oblivion, like creeping moss,
The ageing gravestone's dross,
Inhumes even your stone carved name.

Think that you may roll back the time?
Or change the marching season's rhyme?
With some cosmetic skill
Or false elixirial pill?
That lilies may forever bloom,
At your half heard command,
Your drowning lost demand,
Your existence to expand,
Against the force of nature?

That force that makes the winter's chill,
And keeps the spheres a spinning still,
Or'whelms all mortal frame,
And cares not what your name.
Beyond our comprehension.
And would you yet deny,
The rainbow promise in the sky,
As the ageless years go by,
That seasons will continue?

And force the clod earths stone hard clasp,
Clenched frozen in deaths winter grasp,
To crumble ‘neath the awakening bower,
Helpless against the snowdrops power,
And first wild flowers of Spring.
That sown in the ground to die,
It's lifeless end does thus belie,
The means by which it glorify.
And, so is the resurrection of the dead