A Verse of Life

A Verse of Life
Written in 8th Grade, I think

The sun shining green through the leaves in the trees,
As the birds sing a lazy duet with the breeze,
And we laugh in the shade of the riverside glade
With our feet in the water and pink lemonade.
Watching wild dragonflies, hearing soft lullabies
of the blue channel flowing as it softly slides
beyond our true existence and down through the moss.

And inside the pale haze of the meadow's old days,
Near the rotten wood fence where the aging squirrel plays,
The new fawn huddles deep in the old bramble heap,
Sitting silent as hounds hunt intense by his keep,
Calmly knowing he's won a day more in the sun,
For a lifetime is long and the pack is still young,
And the trail he treads now is an easy downhill.

But our smiles shrink to size as the aging squirrel dies,
After many warm years in the field where he lies,
where the sun feeds the flowers that grow by his head.
And inside a new year, when the harvest was near,
I found blood on the wheat where the hounds killed a deer,
But I also found grass shoots where once had been sand.