[Martin Elster]

One Summer Day

An allusion to Beethoven

While walking through the woods one summer day,
he glanced along a river, clear and bright,
saw bubbling notes like dappled fish at play,
and dashed them off that night by candlelight.
Meandering down coniferous-scented trails
where chickadees and tree frogs made such noise,
he didn’t hear a thing except the scales
and chords and cadences that were his toys.
He couldn’t hear the leaves in the aspen thickets,
the deer flies buzzing round his graying hair,
the sound of countless madly rasping crickets,
nor the peals of far-off thunder in the air.
Yet who can miss those leaves, that summer breeze,
that river rushing through his symphonies?

(Appeared in The Society of Classical Poets.)