random thoughts - lemonaid

there are a couple of Robert Frost poems I encountered
in college that keep rambling around in my memory:
A two line couplet :

The Span Of Life
The old dog barks backwards without getting up.
I can remember when he was a pup.

and
The Oven Bird

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.


when hopes falter, expectations fail and dreams
suddenly realizing the lack of wings
feel their weight and fall
when metaphors grow old and bite
what do you make of a diminished thing ?

The answer? take a bus, take a train, make lemonaid?