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Summer Fields
by R.L. Boyer
There was a time when meadow, grove and stream,
The earth, and every common sight
To me did seem
Appareled in celestial light
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
— Wordsworth
I.
Sweet memories of youth, echoes in the Mind's
Eye: the face of a girl, golden hair blowing
Wild in the breeze; glittering sunlight on
A deep forest stream, swimming with trout;
A calm hidden lake in the blue sunrise;
Sweet innocence of a boy, at play in summer fields
That sing to him like dreams.
II.
Then, the change came, a darkening
Of the Moon: a child lost, Nietzche's
Orphaned shrieks, a festering, wounded
Soul; knowledge of good and evil, of life,
Of loss and death; dark side of the god that dies,
The wounded thigh, the rib torn out;
An invisible blood stain that won't wash
Clean; innocence betrayed, grown proud
And sad, an eagle devouring its liver;
Flesh enclosing Vision, like a heavy eyelid,
Like a shroud, like melancholy — heavy,
With tears that fall like rain on
The lost gardens of Paradise.
III.
O Child of Sorrows, twice-born, wounded
Healer, shaman, initiate, hero, poet —
The one who walks with a limp: The
Orchards grow fruitful in springtime. The
Serpent sheds its skin, and grows another. The
Swallows return to their nests every season.
Sunset, sunrise. To the ebb, flow; to death,
Regeneration. To the dark of the moon, her
Fullness; to the journey of descent, Return.
The way of return is difficult, cry the Poets.
No one returns, unmarked. But for THAT one
The golden wheat ripens in summer fields
That sing to him like dreams.
 Ron Boyer is an award-winning poet and author of short stories. He was a founding editor of "The Laughing Man" magazine, a journal of contemporary spirituality whose contributors included Joseph Campbell and Joan Halifax. Boyer was also the director of The Sonoma Institute, the first accredited graduate training program in the country for humanistic-transpersonal psychotherapists. Faculty included James Hillman and Robert Bly. He currently lives in Toronto where he is writing his first book, The Mythic Orphan: Archetypal Origins of the Hero in Mythology, Literature and Film. He can be contacted at www.myspace.com/rlboyer.
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