Tag: Loneliness

Into the Valley

Some visit there, some live there.

He went to see her
After many years

In the house in the valley
She and her late husband had built
Where they raised their children
Now grown and gone

Her house had a fragrance like apples
And they spoke of the sadness
Of her last few years
Over glasses of wine

And the intensity
Of her loneliness
Escaped from her, unwillingly
Like light under a doorway

And she asked him to stay
First with her words
And then
With her mouth
And her whole body

And she became
Not young
But eternal in the night
Timeless
Motion and softness
Strength and yielding

And the solitary house
By the base of the valley road
Sat green and silent
In the morning light

As he drove back to where he came from

As she turned in bed to catch another hour’s sleep

And Then

Maybe this is me.

And then maybe this is me
Just a dying leafless tree
As the winter cold sets in
Blighted and beset by sin

Sin as separation from
All that could have should have come
Yet alone here on the plain
I alone erect in pain

Pain always my mind besetting
Leaves no chance of e’er forgetting
Sole discarded cold debris
And then maybe this

Is me

murray river basin

the earth is thirsty

the earth is thirsty so am i
out past where we all come to die
alone and without celebrant
a wastrel bard irrelevant
the half-cocked eye the shaking lip
fair captain of a foundered ship
the desert plain of fated need
to thirst to ache
to drop

to bleed

Once Upon A Moon

He told her, once upon a moon,
That “love’s a true-and-always thing” —
They watched the curtains turn to night,
And heard the song the first-birds sing —

She wishes now, upon a star,
That he’d float back on some balloon;
But all is loneliness, and cloud,
And once, was really once
Upon a moon