North country, dales, swales
Clouded gray mantle
  covering the ancient sod
Grit stone, millstone
Cloisters and old souls
Swallowed up in a culture
   lost in timeless time

Still, sullen, the clouds hang
   somberly cloaking the day
Oak, beech, sycamore
   swathing the rolling hills
Down to the river, brown
   flowing in history
Past farm, village
   and broken priory

Ruins, crosses and moss gnarled
   tombstones
Yew trees tortured in their
   infinite ancestry
Watchful, silent sentinels
   to timeless passage
To the river and the limestone hills
   patterned in smoke gray
     crazy walls, dry stone
Hewn and gathered in timeless
   time

 

Poetry came to me in my middle years, that is those years between the tumultuous past and the pursuant future. It seemed all my life I was a poet, yet the poetry was locked within my soul. I have had the good fortune to see much of the world, to be a professor and follow a scholarly yet practical course, and sample much of life's indulgences, to feast, indulge and thirst for more. Yet somewhere in this frenetic rampage, I began to realize that I did not know myself, yet alone understand my world. In recovery from addiction to the ferment of the vine, I began to see the reality of existence ... to feel, see, smell, taste, marvel at the purity of the rose ... the sweetness of the wind in the bamboo, the loveliness of the morning chorus. It seemed I was born again among the romantic notions of the trees, the flowers, the ocean swell. And though improbable, here in the lunacy of a latter day Hollywood movie scene, all chaos and craving, yet here I was a poet ... a romantic, a symbolist, intuitively writing poetry as though I was surrounded by pastoral lakes and woodland. And so it was that about 3 years ago I found myself immersed in a poetic world, of profound vision, unimaginable beauty and inexorable soul searching ... writing my thoughts, my love, my vision ... a poet at last!

View Michael's website at http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Parc/2331/.

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