Time has changed me
And yet it has not changed anything at all
A full heart still beats.
I have many memories,
I am rich in memories.
So many old friends
Family near and far
Gone, most of them
Some from this place
This failing land
This hard hard world.
Life is now a gentle afternoon nap
On a warm day
In calm weather
The sun peering gently from behind the leaves of that tree.
It bathes the brick-paved ground in a gentle green light
As it ever did.
Birds, invisible in the thick foliage
Give song to all that lives.
Do they have memory?
What would they remember?
The stillness and the warmth of a moment ago?
Now the sun goes
Darkness descends.
I have not moved from my comfortable chair
I am still, the world moves round me.
In the distance I hear traffic
And then, due to the lateness of the hour, that sound recedes.
And in this night, the memories of millions of years of this continent,
The sea hurls itself at the beach
Crashing, roaring, buffeting
Pounding its fists on the rocks
Punching the air
Taunting the stars
As it ever did.
But as for me, now,
I live mostly in my head.
In the cold, cold morning
I will go down to the waterline
I am increasingly alone
That sound, the seagull’s cry
That’s my voice.
In the empty air
In the thin, cold wind
That scours these beaches, these bushes that will never be trees.
That sound is these words.
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© Harry Friedland 2022 https://hjfriedland.blogspot.com/?m=1
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