On Seeing An Old Friend
by David Asia (April 2014)
I saw and old friend yesterday,
A farmer,
Still wrapped
Cleaving to the founding generation,
Solid stock,
Who chewed at timber,
Tore at rock,
And greened their lands
With defiant arteries of water.
As before,
The rains had failed him,
The snows slid too quickly
Down the dry throat
Of the hills,
And the land itself
Shrugged,
And dozed.
His children had come of age,
The eldest fleeing to Baltimore,
And the baby
Disappearing over time
Leaving him and his weathered wife
Alone,
Tangled up in the
Tired machinery of farming,
And at war with everything,
From their own exhausted chemistry,
The timekeeper is fickle.
One moment she exalts us
And we look out upon
An ocean of ourselves.
The next,
We are islands
In a shallow sea of other,
Buoyed only by nostalgia,
And betrayed at last even by water,
The dearest of our children,
As it turns away from our fields,
Towards the lawns and gardens
Of those who would
Too easily forget
We were here.
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