Survivors

Time

Time

Where is time going
when it overtakes me
in its speeding car
and leaves me lumbering
along life’s highway?

It’s after five to twelve
and the morning has flashed by.
The clock is about to strike,
and the afternoon draws near.
It too will vanish, a milestone,
millstone tied to day’s neck.

I remember the old days
when the big handed pointed to XI
and the small hand pointed to XII.

Now the clock is starting to strike.
I have left the last gas station way
behind me and my motor’s failing,
and my car is running out of gas.

Middens by Jarea

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Kingsbrae 25.4
25 June 2017

Middens by Jarea

Garbage dumps they are to us,
filled with childhood treasures,
shaped flints, arrowheads, spear
tips, scrapers for deer hide,
so many castaway items.

Garbage dumps to us, maybe,
but for the Passamaquoddy
who first settled this area
and lived on this shore,
these precious middens
are anything but dumps.

They are guide posts,
lighthouses in the moonlight,
signposts to point the way
for wayfarers and wanderers,
at high tide, low tide,
and especially when the mudflats
bathe beneath sun and moon
and the channels twist and turn,
serpentine labyrinths in their wanderings.

Garbage: we dig up what they have left,
expose past lives to scientific theories,
and destroy their navigational knowledge,
the science they left behind.

Jarea

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Kingsbrae 25.1
25 June 2017

Jarea

This is a glimpse of
how it might be.

Surrounded by paintings,
snapshots and memories,
all we have ever done
hanging on the walls
as if we were visiting
a gallery of our lives.

Impressions from our childhood
line up beside
expressions of our adolescence
and
abstracts extracted
from our more mature years.

Time,
we are running out of time,
and our here and now is
a quality of deafness leading us
into the next dimension.

We will see our whole life,
in that blink of an eye.
Then there will be farewells,
a sudden silence,
and we will be gone.

Old Sow

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Kingsbrae 22.3
22 June 2017

Old Sow

The good luck ship
flies its Jolly Roger
and all is well with the world.

No pirates now
bury their treasure
on Oak Island,
nor skirt the Old Sow
as she sucks away
at the ocean depths..

Porpoise and whale
come to her feeding grounds,
milking the maelstrom
she churns up from her seas.

Warm is her welcome
to travelers brave
who test their courage
on her swirling waves.

Wollemi

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Kingsbrae 21.3
21 June 2017

Wollemi Nobilis

To see you on this day,
the summer solstice,
when time and the sun
stand still,
is to recall you as relictus,
then to acclaim you
as Lazarus,
risen from the dead.

Your fossil footprints
walked for so long,
two hundred million years,
and you walked with them,
unknown, unrecognized,
lost in the wilderness.

What poverty in language:
we either describe you
in impossible scientific Latin
or else we reduce you
to a chocolate coco pops
breakfast cereal.

Hand-cuffed, chained,
your feet rooted within
this immobile crockery pot,
you will never leave us now.

You are your own solstice,
a stationary seed,
growing to adulthood,
sown in a circle
of never-ending time.

Comment: I have been trying since Sunday, 5 March 2017, to write this poem. But what are four months in the life of a seventy-three year old poet or a pine tree that was thought to have become extinct 200 million years ago. I do not have the words to express how I feel looking at this throwback to the time of the Dinosaurs. And maybe that is how this poem should start for it is, after all, Wordless Wednesday … “I do not have the words …” and thoughts, too, jam in the brain and refuse to cycle, let alone re-cycle. So, I’ll leave this poem for now. That said, I will probably come back to it. Meanwhile, do I ever feel so absolutely, totally, and completely inadequate.

Sometimes

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Kingsbrae 20.3
20 June 2017

Some Times

Sometimes,
something happens:
lightning strikes the tree,
the upraised golf club,
the umbrella,
the baby’s stroller.

Maybe
an earthquake rocks the house,
or
hailstones as big as golf balls
shatter the greenhouse glass.

More often
it is as silent as frost on geraniums,
or clothes on the line quick-frozen in the wind.

Slow crumbling:
a breaking down by freeze and thaw,
free fall on the cliff face and the subsequent scree.

A cloud passes overhead:
our sunshine vanishes.

Blockhouse

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Kingsbrae 19.4
19 June 2017

Blockhouse

We have become comfortable together.
We sit, food untouched on the table,
and play catch-up with our lives.

I tell her about my writing problems
and she tells me about her hopes and
fears for the future now her partner’s
walked out and left her for a younger girl.

Later, I sit in the car while she walks
on the headland by the blockhouse.

Mist covers Passamaquoddy Bay.
There was a time when I thought
she might walk out into that mist
and fade away, but she was strong.

Now I watch her walk away and
know that she’s really here to stay.

Waves

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Kingsbrae 19.2
19 June 2017

Waves

Some nights,
the stars leave
their constellations
to walk alone.

The planets, too,
grow tired of company
and shine in solitude.

Where now the Zodiac
and Plato’s Platonic
dance of the spheres?

Who knows why a man
will one day walk out of the house,
and never return?

Who knows why a woman
will abandon her children,
turn her back on her lover,
and look only at the wall?

I only know this: that the tide
is composed of multiple waves,
and that each one lives and dies,
alone on the beach.

Stand Off

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Kingsbrae 16.3
16 June 2017

Stand off

Yesterday,
a raven and an eagle,
bald-headed,
faced off on the ice.

They stared at each other,
necks tucked into
hunched shoulders,
feathers fluffed,
otherwise unmoved,
unmoving.

Each dared the other
to make himself vulnerable,
to stretch out his neck
for the dead fish lying
beside the ice hole
they both guarded.

It seemed as if
they were waiting
for the opening whistle
that would send them
head to head
in mortal combat.

Immobile combatants.
Slow dance of moving ice,
cracked and crackling.
Sudden swift sparring:
a dance of death.

Beachcombers

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Kingsbrae 15.4
15 June 2017

Beachcombers

Low tide on the island,
the bay haloed with silence.
Wading in the distance,
tourists and school kids,
shapes wading in shallows.

Soft footprints, my past,
through a seascape of echoes:
sand at the Slipway
and
rocks at Pwll Ddu.

Another sea now,
and a similar shoreline;
same light in the sky
as, barefoot, the bathers
still hop and still stumble
over sharp pebbles.

Time walks backwards
and fills me with sorrow.
Ghosts of my mother,
my father, lost brothers.

Clouds cover the sun:
so sudden the tear-tang,
salty on tongue