"The Author-Preneur with Something To Say That You'll Love To Read." #authorpreneurTJM

Eyes of Time

How is this land
laid out across the
boundary of my days?
Can my mid-life
eyes match
itself to the
heart I grew
throughout my living?
Where is the grave
of mom-mom and pop-pop?

Each tree feels
like “the tree”

by their place
of rest
on this soil
of their repose.
The strange
familiar is shadowed
and replaced
by doubts and
ambling that
betrays a need
to find what I
think I should
be able to know.

I wander 
and can
feel my eyes crying out
to my heart 
for some
inkling of impression,
some remembrance 
of the way the leaves 
of grass
had once leaned
this way and that
into the place of their
still bodies.

I hear his voice
mocking
my childhood hair
that had grown
beyond the edges
of his comfort.

He told me
he would find
a yellow ribbon
for my locks,
which makes me
laugh today –

because -
as by chance - 
I have
pulled my hair
back - to a ponytail -
and secured it
with the only hairband
in my car – yellow.
The circuitousness of
my days brings a
chuckle enjoyment to
my being.

Still, I cannot
find the place they have
lain in the ground
these many years.

Odd, the tricks
time plays on the
thing we hold to
so very dear.

Looking for familiar,
we find a harrowing
newness revealed in
ways that cannot allow us
a moment of wonder.
What is to become
of the heart that
longs for remembrance
and finds only strangeness
all around.

The dappled light of a
tree against a cloudless
sky somehow catches
my eye for just 
one slivered instant
of a quickly
passing second;

and my feet
remember the path
to their grave in ways
my heart finds astounding.

There they are.

Their bronze marker
covered in layers
of dried silt and dead
roots. Their silent dismay
at the lack of care asks
me why I have not come
to them before.

I sit there
with them and
eat my lunch.
Can they hear
the words I share
with them about
what I do and who
I have become in
the absence of their
living at my side?

My bee brush
is a worthy friend to
help me clean the
dirt from the memory
of the metal plate that
slowly reveals their
names to me and
the numbers of their
days on this earth-place.

As the memories
tumble slowly from
my mind onto the empty
lines of the journal in
my car, I am transfixed
by the power that
letters can have 
to help recall a life 
to the mind
and to the heart.

And, on this day,
as I sit here composing
words of that day of
discovered tales and
colored impressions
from my youth, I look
for the book that is
no longer here –
at my side –  to give
me direction along the
lineaments of their lives
and order the things
I felt sitting there in
that day’s sun
of simple repose.

Again, there is no
magic harbinger of the
then in the now.  A leaf
falls to the ground but once
and dies a thousands days
as it becomes the earth
upon which we stand.

Can my mid-life
eyes match
itself to the
heart I grew
throughout my living?
What I know
for sure, 
is the bronze was
clean and 
their memory
strong for just one
moment on the underside
of the winds of remembering.
The glint of a forgotten
path revealed itself
across a few
small increments
of this rival we call


time.


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