09-07-2012, 08:37 PM
Swallows dawn upon black wires
to rest from winters far away.
Year on year I watch them, each like each in every way.
Not so with us, we make each day a journey,
returning every daybreak to our lives;
but you and I, days into years, are dying.
The swallows though, stay slick and bright of eye.
Are they the same bright eyes you saw last summer?
Or did the one you thought you knew fly by?
And is the one so very like another
that difference makes no matter in the round;
and broken winged, the one you thought familiar,
is fallen and lies dead on foreign ground?
There is a starved and hollow man, a father;
his children are the hungrier by their lives.
You see the bundled rags which was their mother,
and but for death, the walking widowed wives.
Yet here I sit, and mindful of the image,
the constant swallow swoops into my view;
but is it he, the one I knew was flying
back from that wasted, hot and sterile land?
And do the men of cloth and sticks still lie there
with neither wings to fly nor strength to stand?
And is one man so very like another,
that difference makes no matter in the round?
And is it he, the one you thought you cried for,
or just another, dead upon the ground.
Tectak 2011 (rev 1 2012)
Originally posted in another place but considered then unworthy. This is a rework prompted by heslopian's "Countless". Thanks for the prod, Jack. I hope I am worthy.
to rest from winters far away.
Year on year I watch them, each like each in every way.
Not so with us, we make each day a journey,
returning every daybreak to our lives;
but you and I, days into years, are dying.
The swallows though, stay slick and bright of eye.
Are they the same bright eyes you saw last summer?
Or did the one you thought you knew fly by?
And is the one so very like another
that difference makes no matter in the round;
and broken winged, the one you thought familiar,
is fallen and lies dead on foreign ground?
There is a starved and hollow man, a father;
his children are the hungrier by their lives.
You see the bundled rags which was their mother,
and but for death, the walking widowed wives.
Yet here I sit, and mindful of the image,
the constant swallow swoops into my view;
but is it he, the one I knew was flying
back from that wasted, hot and sterile land?
And do the men of cloth and sticks still lie there
with neither wings to fly nor strength to stand?
And is one man so very like another,
that difference makes no matter in the round?
And is it he, the one you thought you cried for,
or just another, dead upon the ground.
Tectak 2011 (rev 1 2012)
Originally posted in another place but considered then unworthy. This is a rework prompted by heslopian's "Countless". Thanks for the prod, Jack. I hope I am worthy.