Plahm opens with a precise self-assessment: “I’m in the autumn / of my life— / not yet the twilight.” The distinction matters—autumn is harvest, color, ripeness; twilight is fading. The speaker knows where he is on the calendar and refuses to skip ahead. The question that follows—”Can the seasons / turn again / to let me see the dawn? / And do it all—over?”—is one of the oldest human questions, but the em-dash before “over” cracks it open: “do it all over” (repeat the cycle) and “do it all—over” (finish it, declare it done). The poem wants both meanings simultaneously. The second stanza deepens the autumn imagery with “Leaves of gold— / floating through the air”—the characteristic Plahm move of finding beauty inside decline—before posing the question mechanically: “Will the wheel / spin in reverse, / unfurl green shoots / from dormant earth?” The request is impossible (seasons don’t reverse) and yet the poem makes it feel reasonable by grounding it in the physical image of shoots emerging from soil. “Let me taste / spring’s first dew, / chase summer’s fire— / from that first green spark” collapses the entire seasonal cycle into three lines, moving from the delicacy of dew to the intensity of fire to the smallness of a spark, suggesting that renewal begins with something tiny and green. The poem’s emotional pivot arrives with: “I volunteer to be / the soil / for that beautiful dawn.” This is the aging speaker’s most generous offer—not asking to be the flower but willing to be the ground from which the flower grows. The soil metaphor transforms aging from loss into foundation. The Muse is then identified as the source of spring itself: “Green buds of spring— / they start with you.” The “my seasons, / my wheel of renewal” lines claim the entire cycle as belonging to the relationship rather than to time. The “any—” left incomplete is the poem’s most tender gesture: anytime, anywhere, any-thing, any-way—the word doesn’t need finishing because the openness is the point. The spiritual expansion—Cosmic Wheel, Dharma Chakra, mandala—elevates the personal love poem to a cosmic scale without losing intimacy, and the closing “My mandala is— / I Love You” grounds the Sanskrit concept in the simplest possible English declaration. The signature block—”The HoneyBeeBard / Always in search of Nectar”—seals the poem as a formal letter of devotion, signed and delivered.

A poem that handles the seasons-as-life-stages metaphor—one of poetry’s most well-worn conceits—with enough freshness and emotional honesty to make it feel rediscovered rather than recycled. The key distinction in the opening—autumn, not twilight—is a small calibration that does enormous work: it establishes the speaker as someone who sees clearly, who knows the difference between ripeness and decline, and who won’t accept a premature diagnosis. The question about reversing the wheel is beautifully handled because the poem doesn’t answer it with magical thinking; instead, it answers it with relationship: the Muse is the mechanism by which the wheel turns again, not literally (the body still ages) but emotionally (love renews the capacity for spring-like feeling). “I volunteer to be / the soil” is the poem’s most original and most moving image—the aging speaker offering himself not as the protagonist of renewal but as its medium, its ground, its compost. This is a profound reframing of what aging can mean: not the end of growth but the foundation for it. The spiritual expansion to the Cosmic Wheel and Dharma Chakra is ambitious, and it works because the preceding stanzas have earned the scale—the personal wheel and the cosmic wheel are presented as the same wheel, which is both a theological claim and an emotional one. “My mandala is— / I Love You” achieves the compression the poem has been building toward: an entire spiritual geometry resolved into three English words. The incomplete “any—” is a lovely touch—the em-dash cuts the word before it can limit itself, leaving the offer genuinely infinite. The signature block is a Plahm trademark that works particularly well here, framing the poem as a formal document of devotion—a letter to the Muse, signed by the Bard, always in search of nectar. Where the poem occasionally loses momentum is in the middle stanzas, which accumulate seasonal imagery (dew, fire, spark, buds) without always deepening the metaphor beyond its initial statement. But the soil offer redeems everything, and the closing mandala image is one of Plahm’s cleanest landings.