How Oft-Soft a Sense of Joy-filled Grief...

...or, is it grief-filled joy?? (below, a week ago) "If the tulips never diedthe season for irises and peonies,columbine and corn flowers, would never be born"was my consolation during this morning's flower-garden stroll... How oft/soft the haste of moments stirsA bittersweet-ness as it blursThe very present with the pastEphemeral, yet iron-cast How oft a long-awaited dayOf balmy breeze and sunbeam-playUnfolds its bloom upon a stemThat cannot keep its diadem …where soon echoes and petals meldTo grace the place where death is heldWhile overhead life thunders byBeneath a rising, falling sky How oft delight is caught off-guardWhere children dash across the yardHeedless of currents that commenceTo bear them from sweet innocence …where soon they humble love's replyWith gaze that meets gaze, eye to eyeAnd we begin to revere moreThe Hand that draws ajar dawn’s door And we begin to slow our paceTo drain each precious drop of graceFrom breakers as they heave and swell To wash dusk's shorelines with farewell How oft we run with outstretched armsBut cannot hold for long, life’s charmsAs love, ever a student, gapesWith groping awe, at spent landscapes How oft we, like our silenced kinWhen in the prime of groan and grinBegin to sense a glove-like sky  Taming/claiming an ocean of reply How oft then, time's momentum wakesA bittersweet climax that breaksLike foaming tides across a shoreWhere lust for love and life implore © Janet Martin Eccles.3: 1-2To everything there is a season,A time for every purpose under heaven: A time []to be born,And a time to die;A time to plant,And a time to pluck what is planted;...