It is the brown season.

Stalks of lilies hard, orange flowers long fallen;

Cold shells where purple flowers dusted your yellow wings

as you probed for nectar, gladly given.

The angled sun brings light but not heat.

These thoughts are sterile weeds, withering all that grows;  too easy to succumb.

Cold creeps from the soil leaving fragile frosty webs, steals through roots

to suck dry the stems where you sought life.

And yet you stay, flitting among the dead flowers,  now hard, protecting their life within, needing heat and touch to flourish. They need you as you need them; shared devotion. Look, you say, look at me. Offering, again offering, the parts of you that bring life.

Love wordless, thought within a shell, needing nectar. A sweet chance, again.

What holds you here, when the others have flown?

The touch of you thrills, the wisp of your voice echoes,

the memories sustain; your crystal eyes.

Once we danced, twirled and touched in the tides of the full moon; were once skin and tongues and fingers probing, shared soft voices, the touch of you thrilling;  once it drew us, we the sweaty beings making life, descendant in the tingling madness. Once; now parted, more dream, than real, less sweet than bitter.

Now the moon has grown small, slivered, the tides withdrawn in a gathering chill, the crazy pull abated.  In this dark absence, I am rooted.

You, in sunlight,  your battered wings caressed.