In Memoria Tenere

Cold, crisp day

milk-gray sky

sitting outside

much of snow gone

reading a book of poetry by

Joanne Kyger

I never got far before

dog sitting beside me

running around

joyful

Japan, India and Ithaca

weaved with Paolo Uccello

and Iliad

all one on this planet

even this beginning of a tooth-ache

the rusted bike beside the shed

that I used almost thirty years ago

Reagan and Gorbachev

and Nemtsov an unknown young man,

not "the man who could have been king"

(The Daily Torygraph)

on the morgue with four bullets in his back

"one for each child he leaves behind)

(Garry Kasparov)

taken by the Moloch's mouth of history

erased from that forever flowing "now"

tried to count the age of the

tree on whose stump I sit on

gave up but hundred years or so

and now that life all open

the slow growth of the 1920s

the fast growth of the post-war years

now felled

and paper in someone's hands

poetry I hope

that takes an emotional knife

and sticks it deep and twists

for all we have lost

we dying cells of the living Earth

28.02.2015