All things

Rivers take their time

She said

So bide your time and all necessary things

Will glide along by

But what of winter

I answered

With its crazed cold floods and lack of light

Its feet dragging in the frost –

When everything is shy

Or starkly dead

As empty as our love’s abandoned bed

Blood thickens and leaf is lost?

All men that can

Must run

To stay from falling, all poems must rhyme

And so must love be fast above all things.

Fred Johnston