The dancing colors have fallen, exhausted from their revelry, right out of the sky and rest in deciduous leaves like roosting birds. In time, they will fall from these perches, too, and diminish while trampled underfoot by the frantic furry feet preparing for winter and joggers running endlessly away from the monsters of ill health and old age.
The last desperate, frost-bitten blooms brown sickishly, fertility having gone for at least the winter, if not forever, leaving the next generation to show up in their finest many months from now. Pruning back a sleepy garden, I am feeling like the flowers. How I want to wilt into nothingness in a dark, secret place while the light is dim and the ice wages its annual battle against the living. My strength is endurance and I know I can outlive the siege at least another year.
If only I could lie in wait, play dead, dozily and blissfully unaware as a seed that will only ever know the sunshine and May. It is said never to wage a land war in Russia in the winter! Therefore, do not rouse me to fight. Let me have my torpor and sloth. It is also said that he who laughs last laughs best, and I am just waiting my turn. In the meantime, Peace on Earth, a peace that comes only with dreams.
Dreams of glittering golden sunbeams on the water and silvery moonbeams illuminating the lining of the clouds. Crisp clean rain and lovers laughing in it and rainbows after. Fresh babies, perfect and raw, still bearing their nascent scent. Crocus, harbingers of hope in imperial purple, pure white, and happy yellow, welcoming all of nature awake. I can then remember what youth feels like in my limbs, productivity budding from me, blooming into full satisfaction and maybe even a little bit of joy.
Oh, do not shake me, do not ask me to smile like some over-ripe deranged jack-o-lantern. Do not make me trudge across the vast snowy desert with promises of harvest or red and green festoons. Do not shine those lights in my eyes or ring the bells in my ear. Carol to me only lullabies. Let me sleep, let me sleep. I want my energy to dance in the meadows in Spring.