Elegy at the End of Mortal Day

- by Wayne David Knoll

Autumn's late green ache straws-off in pastures where
a congregation of wild white Ibis, some with sacred invest of
ruffles at the neck, in-gather wings like long-faced mourners

carrying the keen scimitars of their swords before them
in the paddocks of the (blanketed) living and the dead,
as their prey are, or likely soon will be. As all life feeds

on itself, so its end is ever before us, that sword; there, for all
who have it, for it is with us before we know we have it, and is
not other; before us, whether we are like this dank sky of clouds

that rue the last colours of a just-descended sun, as mere
fickle things of urgent chemistry and physics, else, transport
mind over the west of ends asking back east of our beginnings

In knowing that this longing, a love for breath we have, air upon
which the ibis takes wing, is given somehow as by a kind parent
who allows the vast polarities, this night, this far horizon breaking

slowly alight as the departure of light allows in the screen we call
darkness, with that absence that unroofs this small sky to draw
close in their immeasurable number the distances of the stars.

-9th June 2014