Bring to boil the pot and kettle

Cut the leaves and small trees

Leave behind the harsh reality

And extract the essence.

Sit and toil with molten metal

Push and heave, reach in and seize

Heave forward with gloves on, a finality

And react to the lesson.

Wipe the sweat from your brow

And the cinders from your chest

Put down the half-shaped tool

into the cool blue water.

The hot water is ready now

And the green is at your behest

Don’t weep for nature, only a fool

would weep for something so beautiful.

As the green dissolves in the bubbling mixture

Becoming one with its own, and more than it was

As the dulled grey steel gives way to its cause,

Dry and dead born into new life in boiling heat

Cold and blunt, once with no shape,

now molded with pointed purpose

ends it’s journey in steam to freeze.

Immutable things, a life lived ends,

they can go no further

until they are picked up with careful hands

And taken to the table where new life begins.

Transmutable dreams, where life goes depends,

Nature has its way with the grey and the green

But nature can be understood and those hands see them through their final elemental journey

For where life closes its eyes, blind at the end

The Alchemist sees.