At The End Of Summer Poem by Daniel Brick

After Hafez

A deer, my companion for three seasons
in the wilderness, has left me for her home.
She has obligations there and announced her
return with footprints delicately tracing her path.

Soon relatives who do not know me will cluster
around her, and she will be lost to me. I may see
her with the others treading through the forest's
silence, but she will respond with nature's shyness.

And so it is that I enter a wide, treeless plain,
alone, but not bereft. In my mind's eye, I see her
standing still, as she listened entranced to my human
speech, as if it were tree talk or sun speech, understood

by all creatures touched with higher purpose. No doubt
an impulse was placed into our beings by a power wiser
than both of is. In our winter sleep far apart, a whistling
wind or crack of ice will wake us, and each will see

the image of the other, straining to locate the lost companion.