Remembrance Twenty-Two
The hollow gurgle of summer streams
The hollow gurgle of summer streams
Flowing over rocky beds
Murmurs in my ears. The clouds
Above drift with the grace
of dreams
Through skies painted
brass and blue
By the summer sun. She is not here,
The last of my
generation. Where
She spends her days I do
not know.
Last April brought a cruel
spring.
It bred no lilacs from
cold ground
But death with sharpened
scythe came round
And forestalled all my
bothering
To provide for her when my
time came.
She died untimely, much
too young
She had more harmonies to
sing
She had more future scenes
to dream
But all that planned
retirement went
Away in scattered tendrils
of smoke,
Wisps that drifted until
they broke
And all their dreaming
power was spent.
I hear the silence
reverberate
With echoed memories of
her
Reciting reasons she would
share
For sacrificing all for
her cat.
The silence has become my
friend,
A bulwark against the
emptiness
I wallow in. My days
are less
Each sunrise marks the
approach of my end.
The Olive Grove --Vincent van Gogh
The Olive Grove --Vincent van Gogh
Rik seems to have been clearly influenced by the opening lines of T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land":
ReplyDeleteApril is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain....
Summer surprised us....
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.