Thoughts On A Medicine Walk

Midges, like a scatter of pepper pain Darken the windowsill with their unmourned deaths Every leaf, every flower, every cloud will go that way I too, as my days shorten Grow more and more like the thin flanked temple cat Who walks on stiffening paws The owl that hoots by night outside my room Her sound will cease to echo round the wood Like a mellow flute, stoppered, rendered dumb Forget-me-not is the last plea of the fading petal And indeed what is death but a widening ripple In the pool of the minds of friends, till other ripples arise? I found a litter of corpses once on a Highland road Dead hawk, dead hare, dead flies Like drops of ink writing their own obituaries Poison had entered the food chain, laid by a cunning man For we are skilled in the arts of death Who kill by war and murder Our kind and other creatures I do not fear to step out of my footsteps I only fear the means of that last departure Would float like Shallot's cold lady Off on a river of flowers if Fate allowed