Did you ever wander
Among the winking
Cobwebbed nooks
Of times gone by,
Among the darkened, wind-shifting streets,
Or else leaf through
Broken backed and faded books
On the forgotten shelf?
Or peer at a copper plate
Of unremembered scripts
Of ancient deeds
And hero tales long left
Unsung,
Or drift among those lost stone gods,
Their noses knocked asunder
By mortar fire
In some unmentionable war,
Or, through rain that falls in opalescent sheets,
Seek out temples entrenched under
The thick jungled trunks of time, of seeding pods, and twilit weeds,
Or visit deep in crypts
Where rest the tales, in a lost urn,
Of eons flown,
Of higher, rainbowed hallways in the sky
Where gods and beings once had shone
When trees were worshipped,
As they ought to be,
When holy rocks
And elf
And giant
Roamed among the crowds
Of shimmering lilies in the mist,
Where deer run free
And hummingbirds hover
In the half-lit glimmer of the dancing dawn
On those wildflowered ilses – still untouched, radiant –
Or have you
Heard coursing hooves ringing
Through the starbright forest
Of a green-mossed eternity,
And did you ever gasp
To glance back
At the paltry present time that seemed
So suddenly all awry,
So shorn of grace?
Look now – a poor cut-out,
A false façade,
A parody concocted of every chemical,
Torn metal,
And toxic dust,
A humdrum bar-coded day,
Bereft of meaning,
Meant to squander,
And nights of mechanical terror
That grate
Against the soul,
Though all quite scientific and practical,
Of course.
Did you ever find the present world a little lacking?
Cars chrome-bright, junkyards of rust,
Oil wells bubbling
And spewing out the oddest orange river,
Computer graphics jingling a frantic caper,
Medical mirages, ill-inducing potion and pill?
War-cratered skeletons
Of cities loom at the edge of the shattered rim,
Lies and lies and weary doom
And here comes death – grim and dreary –
Tripping after.
A clanking alleyway
Where the faltering march
Of the bedraggled lout,
The troll,
Plunges on and on
Into the dank and danker
Cellars of caustic confusion
(Where now the shack
On the hill
That slipped
Into the mist
Where strangers from a far star
Sought shelter?)
Did you ever watch that oft-trod stairway
From the first magic light of stars, fall
Down, down into the iron pits of delusion,
Of nowhere at all,
Where darkness dwells and nothing more?
And did you ever wonder
When will the thunderclouds gather again
And the wind fiercely roar,
Dragon-winged in snow
And sleet,
Spilling rain
Across the open plain
Like the glad-running,
Unshod
Feet
Of the wild horse
That once gleamed
In the sun,
Rain clouds like the enduring face
Of an early people
Brave, eagle-hearted,
Who will walk again
To the quickening drum of wisdom?
Now will the improbable one
Who speaks with unforked tongue
Return,
Followed by those who shake the sleep from their eyes
In the wan,
Uncharted
Light of a new
Day?
When
Will the wind blow
A wind to make way
For the gods of yesteryear
To unclasp
The hold
On the windowed arch,
On those most ancient rocks
That climb like towers
To the sky,
Who bring back the innocent ones,
The cottontail, the whimsical sage grouse, the fox,
The juniper stand,
The pinions,
The cry
Of the killdeer,
The wild flowers,
And the coyote who dances in the gentle moonlight,
Her song
Unheard
So long
Yet ever remembered,
Bright
In the mystic night,
So old, and gone
And yet to rise again
When the winds call
Alone on the stone
And grass-blown land?
Written in October, 2015
© Sharon St Joan, 2017
Photo: © Dan Ross / Dreamstime.com
