A rolling gray palls over the mid-day afternoon,
Near land covered in forbidding cloud, yet as not threatening to burst.
The air thick, and treacly. Damp arms, moist necks, circled breaths,
Like so many pulls of wool to conceal the maw; heavy, rank and stifling. A cocooned jaw.
A muffled inhale, weak to sate weary nostrils, slow to flood a slow-pulsed heart.
The air is still. Not so the land.
It hums again with loud insistence. Now softly purring, now richly whirring,
A land returned once again to its own dominion, mastered by great and small.
And if all are masters could yet any be masters? Or none, it matters not,
The old lords long departed, they who thought themselves kings.
Ages did they roam, unseeing, unconcerned, even unhappily. What men are happy kings?
Now they are fled, withdrawn to their castles, no portals, no gates, no footmen on the bridges.
Desolate, isolate, incommunicate. Hungry, pacing, unkempt. Nowhere to go; too bad.
The world to its former glory; see now, gold adorns the tops of trees.
Coloured wings glimmer, festive, grasping now a stalk of ripened grass-seed, worrying now an upturned flower.
A thick buzz emanates, fitting and stopping, then plying unchallenged. For how else shall the Master Grasshopper win his spurs.
Old giants, the trees decline to sway, ancient songs written in thick lines on their bark will not be sung today.
No conductor leads them, no reed ticks off little tremors of rhyme and tenor.
For the air is still, pristine, insistent in its steady majesty;
Time paused but always alive in mysterious animus.
A living carpet verdant sprawls far afield, it needs no spinning.
Underfoot lies its web of trailing tendril, above the surface, a tickling, fuzzy rug of live strands.
Pervasive yet not proud, though it conceals a true kingdom;
Regal are the insectalia, noble though crawling on their bellies, rightful though they nose closely the ground.
Varied are its populaces, shy now under raised green blades, curious now though the stone settles on their backs,
Each to their task, thus forming a polis of unimaginable strength and depth.
Subterranean, a murky underworld of suspicion, subterfuge, and predation.
Yet all in survival, the golden rule, better yet than any other invented. Needs be.
So all is fair, in death all are equal;
If one feeds on another his kin need not visit vengeance on the other. Only needs be.
No office polices misdemeanours here, no agency surveils miscreants.
All beasts being angels, each according to their own kind, trusting the better angels of their nature.
Alive, all are alive, and who is left to say how well it is.
The world deprived of Man, then abandoned to his devices. To spiral into an empty house, only his soul.
Who has fed poorly in the summer of his strength, thieving on needs more desperate than his own.
Now emptied, his cupboard lies bereft, all things left apart, the centre does not hold.
Needs he sup on the abuses of old age, poorly he tends over his decline.
Anger, raking over the last ashes of bygone glory.
Slow the fire that smoulders to its destruction,
Furious the embers that feed their blind hunger, dance their final kalinka, swarm to the inevitable, their oblivion.
See enraged creation squirm, desperate, life slipping from its grasp.
And yet, to what end? No fist in anger ever saved a life worth changing,
No history worth recall rescued in a pique of maddened impulse,
No chorus penned by latin hands echoed in the sighs of travelled wind.
Let slip, let fall, let disappear, let return, let end.
And return again to eternal nature, its voices to reign for time, times and half a time.
Till all is renewed, and forever be, man no longer.
