Summer’s Queen

Summer’s Queen casts her light upon the world, a joyful radiance unmatched in its brilliance. She is the loveliest when she’s covered in morning dew, her robes glistening at the hem as she glides through her kingdom. She knows that she is beautiful, yet she is not vain. She stretches out her arms before me, and like a love story is about to be told, I catch my breath and wait for eyes to meet and the beginnings of astonishing secrets to pass between us.

Time stands completely still. Like weavers of ourselves, Summer and I are only aware of each other. Intertwined forever, we pick up where we last left off and a weight is lifted from my soul. I live for Summer. The doe and her fawn understand. Summer is the season of plenty, where the fields are ripe with life and there is a playfulness in the air that cannot be contained.

The days go on forever and the nights are still heavy with the heat of those days, even as the darkness falls.  Summer’s eyes are the deepest emerald, filled with the knowing that only comes from the sensual.  Everything she touches becomes sprinkled with an iridescent kind of magic.  She is the wine and honey cakes shared by us all and given with the promise of more.  When I look at the sky, I think of the trees reaching for it and how they are so overhung with leaves that it is hard to imagine them not being green. Hard to remember the cold, barren winter and how I wept for this season to come. The grasses sway like lovely maidens, drunk on the music of the fae and chasing fireflies in the moonlight.  My soul grows with Summer’s abundance.  It is like all that is left of the good in the world has been cast like a spell over me. The scent of wildflowers and the ponderings of the swallows as they tell their own stories to each other from the barn rafters. The hum of crickets and dragonflies is now the pulse inside me.  The layers of winter now cast aside, washed and hidden in their dark spaces, replaced with barefoot wanderings and skin now touched by the sun. 

Only when Summer reminds me that I am human and will burn do I make my way to cover.  I am taken by the way the forest air tickles my shoulders and the grass feels like a carpet of softly caressing fragments beneath my feet.  “Don’t leave,” I say to her. “Please, stay with me forever.” She only smiles warmly. She is not able to speak untruths, so she doesn’t bother to placate me.

“I will always come again,” is what I hear with my heart. And as that heart breaks into a million pieces, the first hints of Autumn’s breeze cause me to shiver.

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