My Winter
Days
Coarse, blunt hairs sprout from the top
of my nose like the salt wind stunted
trees along Somes Sound.
Why they have started growing
out that way is a mystery to me,
another curse of my Winter days.
I make my wife promise that when I
am lost and mindless in a nursing home,
she will come and pluck them
One by one.
December 27, 2021
It was, of course, the picture that first attracted me; how
one moves away and one stands still.
Which of us is which, I wonder?
That each day we struggle between the forces of life, green
and bearing up through the snow towards the sun,
and death, a quietude when all energy is expended
and space is the only sound;
That we all stagger between one of those gates
and the other, that is well known.
Some are moving forward and some are standing still.
Some are waiting silently and some
are anxious to rush to the same conclusion.
To wait with patience upon the other, unmoving or declining,
is love.
So is being drawn forward by the hand (or wing)
across the landscape spangled with falling stars.
August 5, 2021
If I see the gazelle step lightly thru the high grass,
pause and turn to leap away, I tell the story first
by firelight while the haunches broil.
The sun, the water, the birds in the air,
Mountains to the side and clouds above;
I see only the black eyes of the gazelle in the high grass.
We go down into earth together and the drums echo in the cave.
Here by flame light I sketch my prey alongside the
bears and great cats in profile, one after the other.
Over there, the aurochs roar and the mammoths thunder – gone now.
Later, much later, I will face the lions and put arrow
to their breast. Then others will carve my bearded likeness
and the cats, sleeping in the garden or chased by chariot.
Across my muscled knees, the scratches record my glory,
my name and those of my defeated enemies cast down before me.
The hunter lays aside his atl-atl
and comes in from the sunlight,
comes in thru the French doors to sit
for his portrait on a hobby horse,
ruffles fall away from the sleeve where
he points his baton West.
We think we can smell blood on his hands.
April 11, 2021
reading “Ways of Seeing” by John Berger
