Matin Fugace in the Summer Garden
The somber veil of night’s departing shroud,
A garden wakes—its blooms begin to quake
Beneath the morning mist, demure, yet proud.
Here wanders one whose heart is reckoning,
A Rêveur conscious of Time’s fleeting wing;
He walks where shadow dallies with the light,
In whispered calm that preludes swift day’s flight.
The world, a fragile play on transient stage,
Where every leaf shall fall, each petal fade;
So knows the dreamer, bound by mortal cage,
While seeking self amidst the green arcade.
His footsteps touch the dewy velvet sod,
Each blade a mirror to his faceless God—
No deity to trust, but Time’s cold glass,
Reflecting both his future and his past.
“Am I but echo, fading with the sun,
Or spark eternal dwindling from the flame?
O fleeting dawn, before the hours run,
What name or shape may now my soul reclaim?”
He mused beneath a bough of trembling birch,
Whose leaves, like whispers, coursed in airy lurch,
Each one a cipher writ in Nature’s script—
A tale of selves within the self equipped.
Around him surged the garden’s breath alive!
A myriad wings in early light did dance,
While petals, kissed by dew, with colors strive
To catch the eye and seize the fleeting glance.
Yet all beauty is but a transient guest,
No permanence where Time has laid his test.
The rose—its crimson passion veined with ache—
Must yield at last to frost or dawn’s first break.
He paused where lilies white as fleeting snow
Stretched upward, pure as yearning in his breast;
He sought in them the self he scarce could know,
A spirit clothed in quiet, unconfessed.
“Am I the flower, or the breeze that stirs?
The silent depth where sunlight gently blurs,
Or merely transient dew that fades in shine—
A moment’s gleam within the vast design?”
The path unwound beneath a silvered arch,
Where violets breathed their violet hymns subdued,
And shadows chased the morning’s quickened march,
As if the garden with its life renewed
Reflected all that stirs within his sight,
The struggle ’twixt the transient and the right;
The longing for a self that might endure,
While knowing all must pass beyond the sure.
Within this Eden of ephemeral grace,
He found a marble seat, cold, yet sublime,
Carved smooth with time’s soft touch on sculpted face—
A relic standing still against the clime.
Upon its verge he settled, thoughts astray,
From dawn till high sun claimed the summer day,
And questioned life — a silent, ceaseless stream,
A river flowing past his fragile dream.
A voice then stirred the stillness—soft, and clear,
A wren’s faint trill among the emerald leaves,
A song as old as any mortal fear,
That speaks the truths which silence scarce conceives.
“Why chase the self in shadows twined with day?
What hope remains when all shall melt away?”
He listened close; the morning’s chorus spoke
In melodies akin to hearts that broke.
His mind, a mirror clouded by the glass
Of time’s relentless, coursing crystal flood,
Reflected questions no man can surpass—
Of essence writ in dust and fleeting blood.
“Is self a star that falls behind the veil,
Or smoke that dances ’fore the winds prevail?
A ghostly form caught ‘twixt the dawn and dusk—
Or cobweb fine on fate’s uncertain husk?”
Beneath the bowers clothed in summer’s gold,
The Rêveur’s thoughts unraveled like the vines;
Each tendril craved its own true heart to hold,
Yet found within the labyrinth confines.
He reached toward silence, where the soul may rest,
Unbound by hourglass or mortal quest;
For in the stillness lies the greatest key—
To being’s riddle and identity.
The garden stirred anew—soft zephyrs sighed,
And sunlight threaded through the emerald roof,
A tapestry where Time and Life allied,
Each moment brief, yet rendered all the proof
That beauty born of fragile, fleeting breath
Resists the slowly encroaching death.
Yet even death cannot the self confine,
For what is self if not the endless line?
He rose, and stepping through the summer’s haze,
His hand caressed the maples’ glistening leaves;
Each touch a question cast in tender phrase,
A silent pact that nature thus receives.
“No certainty awaits beyond this glen,
No final knowledge given unto men;
But still I seek—though shadows tempt to stay—
The self that dances with the breaking day.”
So wandered he through labyrinths of thought,
Where every flower sang its subtle lore,
And every breath that dawn and earth had wrought
Became a note in Time’s eternal score.
Yet—what to find beyond the morning’s gleam?
Whence comes the self? The hope? The waking dream?
The garden whispered back in veiled refrain—
“Endure the quest; the path remains unclaimed.”
Upon a bench, beside a silver stream,
He closed his eyes and listened to the flow,
That murmured secrets born from ancient dream,
And whispered truths that vanished as they go.
“Perhaps,” he thought, “the self is not a place,
Nor measure set by time’s relentless chase,
But rather flame that flickers bright and then—
Awaits the dawn to kindle once again.”
The summer garden breathed in endless pulse,
Its fleeting beauty never twice the same,
A symbol grand of life’s ephemeral waltz—
A mirror to the soul’s unspoken name.
The Rêveur’s heart, both burdened and set free,
Accepted thus uncertainty’s decree;
That identity, like dew or dawn’s first ray,
Is never fixed—but flows the endless way.
No final word, no resting in the night,
For Time’s embrace is both a gift and theft;
To quest unending in the fading light,
Where meaning lies in all that’s not bereft.
The garden fades as day ascends the skies,
Its shadows lengthen—as the old hours die;
Yet in the restless soul there beats a fire:
The ceaseless hope, the ever-burning lyre.
O fleeting morning, whisper once again,
Of self and Time entwined in tender dance;
And let the Rêveur’s search not waste in vain,
But find within the moment surest chance—
To be, to question, while the hours fleet,
A paradox where loss and gain shall meet;
No ending sealed, no final form decreed—
The self, the time, forever unavowed seed.
