Summer Dies

Hot brassy days proclaiming their own doom
Stand bodyguard around the infant year.
They bray their challenge to winter's cold
While panting dogs dully lie underfoot.

The heat is everywhere, an atmospheric woolly sweater
Choking and tickling the white-collar man
Who dreams over his papers of beaches and the sun.
Sun, heaven's glaring, rolling, bloodshot eye
Plays Peeping Tom to young love on the sandhills
And censures it with hotter lazier days
Till blood boils under red-brown holiday skins.

Then suddenly the noon-day hours are cooler,
Twilit evenings give way to lengthy nights.
The Hunter and his red-eyed stellar hound
Set early now behind North-western hills.
Look! The moon is haloed, it will rain!
The Summer's old in January, in February it dies.

M. A. Stone