Noble Nobel, a prompting

A poem written after Louise Gluck was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Sunlight to darkness

Summer arrived, then autumn. The leaves turning,
the children bright spots in a mash of bronze and sienna.
 
            ~~~
The children held hands, leaning
to smell the roses.
They were five and seven.
                                    ~~Louise Glück, A Summer Garden
 

After school we walked behind the apartment
to the small park on Via Andrea Ciardo. Shadow
and sunlight fell in equal shades of jade and emerald
and then every version of lush green that Fall afternoon.
There was a long tunnel built here to play
on and over and through. While I watched they
slid from sunlight to darkness, the day quickly
cooling to dusk.  Issac and Justine were flowers
in the garden, then cats hunting lizards
and then careful gatherers collecting cicadas.
Inside their bug houses the new tenants
climbed the scratched walls. Once home
they documented their finds, offered small
lids of water and crumbs, placed them on the balcony,
where they joined lizards and beetles that had spent
the summer feasting on cheese and fruit
and any unfortunate grasshopper that came about.
The agreement was every being would be returned
to their wild home, even the rhino beetle that had escaped
in the kitchen by working its way through
cheese cloth only spent a day or two in captivity
refusing any foods offered. My heart
tightened with each release. Knowing that this agreement
extended to all the guests: lizard, beetle, praying
mantis, child. One day all doors open. One day all
beings go.

                               ~~M.E. Hope