The pulse of her tender wings, the butterfly, and my heart-beat were as one - solemn and lamenting. Each of us were near-silent. Each of us were near-frozen. Each of us were alone and together in the humid moment; for the air was bloated, heavy and close. It was a gloomy saturation. Lady light, it seemed, had forgotten her warm-lit songs and instead found the skin in cool bluish rays. Even the floral scent was sunken, though I cannot fathom how. In all of this, as companion and barometer, sat the butterfly. What I felt, she felt it too, those paper-wings cannot lie.
High-stacked homes shone as stars aligned. They were morse code music. They were a titan’s piano keys. They were an ever changing constant, a reassurance, an urban tranquility. Head-lamps flowed around, rosy tail-lights too. Traffic lights cycled green, amber, red, and back to green again. Though the dayshine bestowed the mountain view, the night bequeathed this sweet sight. To the city lover it is the three-six-five festive lights. In all four bonny seasons, as leaves grew, tumbled and grew once more, there they stood, a forest of gay trees.
Within the antique flute the promise of centuries past, the promise of love's ever-flutter, suffocated in frozen brass. Its long silenced reed clung to eon's spittle as if old man time could reverse his tide. Tarnished, keys seized, it was reduced to little more than a pointless stick.
The clock of dustless shoestring hands ran infinity marathons with ease. The expanse behind and the expanse ahead, it covered in metronomic stride. “Twas not simply a simple time piece, humble though it was, yet a heartbeat for our home. Reliable. Steady. It was as earth meeting soles regardless of incline or weather, in the good times and the bad, in songs of heartfelt joy or tears, a companion it was through those prevailing years.
In that maple dawn, upon a yawn of prairies, the train arced into a visual grin. Gentle clicking as percussion, huckleberry fuelled chickadees as choir, it sang each yard as loudly as a sonnet’s mile. Through wide prairies and mountain passes same, it took the grandest of landscapes, in easy stride. Uphill or down, easy plains or rocky screes, wheels turned. Its chassis, water freckled during the starlit hours, soon dried to a glossy sheen. The engine master smiled, sipping coffee, eyes a dreamy gaze, for if the tracks were his nation's arteries, surely he had become its pulse.
Rain slew in drumming waves, relentless, cold, thick. Though devoid of winter’s sting, the rain that spring was only handsome in its unabashed misery. The sun skulked behind cloud’s tumult, the hazy havoc of the skies, snubbing newborn lambs and calves who promptly theron shivered, shook and died. And, lof the flowers that rose as the very flags of optimism, ne’er a one escaped the drubbing; all were beaten into the dirt, ne’er a one survived.