Poem 74: From the top of the hill on Good Friday

(This poem continues my decision this month to post poems I wrote fifty plus years ago – this week’s poem was written around about when I was 17.)

The hills cringed green, blood-green.
They were thorn-throbbed, twisted; silent down a
Crumpled valley, torn green to the sea
Where two ships lay silvered and
Waiting for another. And on,
On where the ocean turned with the sky
Clouds jarred to royal purple with the mountains.
The air too choked thin and weak as the
Sun sank crippled at three o’clock.

Is there something here which does not pass?
Answer!
Is there something here which does not pass?
Is there nothing still?

I went down the hill and
Wrote what past I had before it fled.

To hear the poem read aloud click HERE.

Poem 71: From the hill in autumn

(The lovely, late Cynthia Jobin – whom a number of you would have encountered – used to re-post earlier posted poems when she had no time or the muse had vanished. What is good for the goose is good for the gander. I shall do the same! This poem – From the hill in autumn – was the first poem I posted, way back. To be honest, I wrote it when I was 18. It’s autumn here now – so it’s appropriate enough. I am 68 so the poem is 50 years old! AND, according to my youthful 18-year old mind, I’m apparently meant to be dead by now!)

It’s lovely from the hill today.
A flock of autumn crows are twirling near
And floating-slow like burnt paper in air,
And vines blood and yellow on a black butterfly
Die slowly as the cold comes
In leaden droplets. Far away, hills turn, hand in hand,
As giant square-dancers turn, happy in a warmer land.
The purple winds call old, sad melodies.

When fifty years limp by and I’m bones and cold
With yellow skin a tattered leaf,
They’ll say, though his bones be straight,
His heart was bent and cried
Like a child on its lonely walks.

It’s autumn, and the scarecrowed trees shed gold.

To hear the poem read aloud click HERE.

Music 59: This old house…

Three photos today!

These are photographs of the house where I grew up. Last week it was bulldozed over to make way for a new highway.

I remember in the early 1960s, Dad building the room to the right in the first and second pictures, and welding the wrought iron railings for the steps in the first and third pictures.

The first photo was 1965. The other two photos were taken recently. It’s all gone now, as things do…

Listen to the music HERE.