we are words on a journey
not the inscriptions of settled people
W. S. Merwin, "An Encampment At Morning"
Inheritance
Crossing this field and pasture no longer either
Half a hundred times or more, never knowing
Its owner and wondering each time as if it were
Some new thought revealed in an old question -
What kind of man could so easily condemn
This barn to its warped and rotting timbers,
To leave it to falter and fall into his neglect;
How the long years of his life and his work
Could have come to nothing more than this.
And perhaps the man has gone no less into
This ground, one stone left of what he cleared
To make his life, and his death, in this place,
This place that is still holding on in a way.
Even now it shelters a hundred small lives,
Mice and spiders, and furtive barn swallows
Who have inherited, in a way from the man,
Their instinct to return to rafters and eaves,
To the darkness he has entered and left them.
I come here now in my sixty-sixth year, perhaps
For the last time, and I begin to understand
An answer, and how it is not only his but mine.
I think of my children, as he must have thought
Of his own, of how they followed their own path,
How we have to walk alone our long last way,
All that we have lived and loved falling away.
My children, I have nothing to leave you now
But this place where I trespass and this poem.
Poetry by countryfog
Read 452 times
Written on 2011-08-12 at 19:49
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