Month: November 2019

A HARD PLACE
The song roars like a river
Crashing deep the rock ravine
I catch the climber falling
And the echo holds her scream.

THE VALLEY
I’m passing through the valley
Flooded like my memory
And there my heart is hanging
From every garden tree.

Everybody now is dead
everyone has gone
I wanted them all to stay
and join with us in song

on the banks of still waters
beside green pastures
in the shadow of the sun
in the full moon raptured.

From the small house
we watch the dust drifting
down the valley like a
greedy cloud of locusts
turning every green leaf
on the roadside to a
dirty brown.

In every shade of green
this lush and native bush
ever dared to dream,
I am fully adorned
yet naked to the eye
that is wakened in the morn
by this creek bed flowing
over stone and forest
and things worth knowing.

I came upon
this Valley road
later in the day,
from my shoulder
I let slip the load
in the shade I lay,
gathered by time,
it stepped me back,
distanced from the fray.

Bury me deep
in the cold earth
of this Valley Road,
bury me after
the dust lies down
and I no longer thirst,
when the sun has
dropped out of the sky
and the moon
alone is watching
with one cold eye.

He planted his garden
to create paradise as he saw it,
as he lived it; and hidden there,
his heart was enfolded by
every tree and shrub and plant
and he rested for a season.

The pursuits of youth,
those adrenalin-fired
challenges and joys,
give you up naturally
in the face of
on-coming years
so that you no longer
miss them or hanker
after them or think about
what has been ‘lost’.

I turned the next corner
and freedom was there
standing on the roadside
thumbing a lift elsewhere.