Already I have begun to change
My blood thickening with age
My body compacting itself with winter storms.
I dream of my sun-lit youth;
Yearn once more to walk the beaches
And the green hills.
Even the names sound foreign to me.
Ah, but it was a fine day
For journeying when I left:
The sun twisted gold,
each snowflake,
a pond to skate upon,
Yellow and white against
The cool blue swell of the sky.
On days like this, it is all I can do
To keep from travelling on forever,
Rambling between the rose bloom and the lilacs
Through the doors I once called home.
Or to sit in this old park of ancient victories,
and watch the clouds belly down to
damp the swells of sea and land with fog,
wear thin the aged lines of buildings and
soften the harsh lines from aged faces.
Fog, sea and sky, this is my legacy;
mountains and memories of distant lands
trace distant patterns on the breeze
charismatic shadows of another life
dark as a murderous cloud of crows,
or the slow skitterish wheeling of rubbish and pigeons;
the subsiding corruption of dreams
worn grey and dirty as the city.