Gone

[pjthompson]

From the notebooks, May 4, 1990:



Gone

Soft sighing of breezes in the tall grass,
soughing of the wind in the millet stalks,
cascade of wind chimes, the mourning of doves,
seed heads scattering in a shattering of wings.

The palm's fronds bend and raise and bend
performing a ritual to life—a tiny life,
creeping and sighing all around and
in the clustering of fronds at its crown.

Far across the field, the dog barks,
quieting the sighing and the creeping,
but not for long. Life is insistent: a chittering
of sparrows battling, a fierce squeaking of mice.

All this life, all this quiet noise,
gone, gone, forced on,
to other fields where wreckers have not reached,
and big diggers leave the earth unturned,
where only small burrowing things disturb the soil—
far, far away from here.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I know a Japanese pop song that expresses just this--the chorus goes "mô, ima wa nai," which means "now it's all gone" So melancholy.　(You can hear it here, but the first 57 seconds are just them chatting)

I loved the sound-words in your poem, and I loved that it had millet stalks.

[pjthompson]

Thank you! This was an elegy for my old neighborhood, the one I grew up in, which had open fields on both sides of our property. We fed the wild birds so the millet stalks tended to grow there. After we left, they built a Public Storage there.

I don't think it would have bothered me so much if they'd built homes there rather than a place for people to store their extra stuff.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I hear you--boy do I hear you. My dad's earliest home is now a parking lot :-(

[pjthompson]

Very melancholy. :-(