Oak Mountain Echoes

These Brief Days
Life travels with the speed of light;
No sooner Monday than it’s Sunday—
A whole week gone, and it seems like one day!
Why do we name the days that fly
Like racing clouds across the sky?
Calling names won’t slow their flight.
Adam and Eve and all your kin,
This is how you’re paying for original sin.
In the garden—

In the garden,
Morning felt like forever;
Noon was time enough to walk
From the northwest corner of the north forty
To the southeast of the south.
In the garden a girl could grow up
In a single April afternoon
Under the apple blossom sprays, heavy,
Heavy with honey-scented white,
And (suspicion being all that ever slept)
When the golden fruit
Weighed down the golden boughs,
Might feast in silver shadows,
Veiled from any troubled gaze.

A gentle comedy, unthinking players!
How could the apple stir our brains
Into the folly of naming these brief days?
Chanting their names like prayers,
We string them together in wilted daisy chains
And set them winding on time’s blurred wheel,
Whirling too fast for us to see
The worm at the core, the serpent at our heel.

Page 21 (copyright 2001 Joanne R. Cage)

2nd prize, State contest, 1998.