If I were a poem

Summer

Voluptuous in plenty, summer is
Neglectful of the earnest ones who’ve sought her.
She best resides with what she images:
Lakes windless with profound sun-shafted water;
Dense orchards in which high-grassed heat grows thick;
The one-lane country road where, on his knees,
A boy initials soft tar with a stick;
Slow creeks which bear flecked light through depths of trees.


And he alone is summer’s who relents
In his poor enterprisings; who can sense,
In alleys petal-blown, the wealth of chance;
Or can, supine in a deep meadow, pass
Warm hours beneath a moving sky’s expanse,
Chewing the sweetness from long stalks of grass.

Timothy Steele