I have failed at my task.
My job is to testify, to bear
witness to the love of life
and the itch toward death.
My hesitant quest
is for words and their order.
But there there must be something
I have overlooked. I never learned
the cause of anything.
The tree beyond this window
is threadbare, tattered
by the wind and rain.
But when the sun was high
and bright on the last day of June,
it wore a great coat of summer leaves.
Our faces are deeply lined now,
hair variegated gray. We heave
from the chair with a groan.
We rise and work and let our dogs
dance around us in sparks of happiness.
At last, the mystery: we turn
to the east, lie down and sleep.

At Year’s End by Kyle Kimberlin is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.