Entropy :    an   Ode  to  be  Chanted

With a nod to the irregularities of Abraham Cowley and the works of the incomparable MacGonnigal


Man cannot halt the changing seasons as they pass with startling speed
inexorably one by one diminishing in number to that final precious few ,
so few remaining that it well behoves us that we take a necessary heed
before that final day when, last column totaled, the full account falls due.

Seasons are like a long, long progress taken through the rooms
that stretch through what we mortals call this world's great mansion;
a long and many doored gallery extending to the encompassing glooms
beyond which finality there is no hope of a further expansion.  

Send out for Spring, then,  to be delivered here neatly in a cardboard box,
then when it comes, that is the time to foot it featly,  even friskily;
show off with the gallop ,  the polka,  the trot of the fleetfoot fox,
though the complexity of the steps can affect your balance riskily.

Each Spring season lightly and gently conceals all those human faults
that painfully assert themselves while bleak winter lies round us cold
prodding, edging the reluctant world into deep ice covered vaults
that no more than partly preserve the creaking dying or the failing old.

Let the theologians argue the values of seasons back and forth, deep immured in their monasteries fusty,  
there is no place for them to enjoy the brilliantly coloured air of the summer sunlight;
Let lawyers arraign miscreants for trial or pore through their volumes of torts in their offices dark and dusty,
secretive, and foregoing weather that would better serve to bring them unfettered delight.

Autumn carries with it an accumulating desire to freely indulge in folly
to fling roses like the riotous throng and kick up heaps of lately fallen leaves,  
but too soon it slows and leads to the growth of a sickly melancholy
dulling a brain unable even to recall the reason why it now mourns or grieves.   

Then winter comes again and the cold wind makes the dripping candles flicker,
dimming their glow as the deepening shadows weave on the walls and waver;
the ailing body slows towards a halt and the failing blood runs thicker,
joints stiffen,  sight blurs and the voice trembles in a mournful quaver.

Believing that he stands like one of the ancient gods, powerful,  proud and tall,
mankind is unwilling to accept the inevitable and irremediable curse  
which condemns that he himself and his works,  though great,  must fall
in ways no different in their end from that of the old entropic universe.