Look Forward To September Poem by Richard R. Navarro

July: the heat sears everything but those sheltered in the shadows.
In an irony, my day starts thinking of its end.
I am drenched in sweat; my gaze piercing through the translucent window,
now opaque in the layers of dust and of cobwebs and of time.
From the blinding glimmer, I sense an afternoon sun in its incompassionate blaze
and think of the birds whose shadows whisk nameless forms on the panes,
mere fleeting blurs to one who sees only through his eyes.
I am like the birds feathered in sadness.
Though I fly, I am able only on wings singed by the sun of solitude.
And I thirst for you in a land parched of everything but the season's harshness.
Now here amidst the dying sound of the boiler's hiss,
four bare walls and a contraption of metal boxes choke me.
I am a bird forced to summer in a sad aviary.
Yet strangely, inside me, there are only patience and silence that breed.
Perhaps it is that I am certain of a September
where all traces of summer are washed away with the falling of leaves,
an autumn where wooden aviaries waste away in the cold damp air.
And I'll take to the sky, made to fly not by instinct but by need.
I will have to seek, what for now, circumstance has taken.
The moon will be my compass, and darkness, my only path.
But the stars will guide me.
I will soar beyond the limits of tears and sacrifices
towards home where you have waited for so long.
At the journey's end, you'll find behind my wings
scorched memories of a strange land,
while within me, unseared by the summer's heat,
in a cove long chasmed by your absence,
there'll be my life in its smallest bundle -
a heart nurtured in the shadows of your love.

Kath, look forward to September...