Remember that stand of pines,
beyond the rocky hills by your house?
Meet me there. Or if not there, then
on that trail, down the river aways,
where the tall grass grows
and the bullfrogs roar in that
funny little way of theirs.
It’s where in the fall the geese come in
light and low at the end of their flight,
tired, not home, but closer.
You must remember it—
down at the end of the road,
past the gate, where the dirt path
rolls on into the old graveyard.
If, by then you haven’t got it,
you can have the rest of it there.
Thank you for reading What I owe, and I humbly appreciate your visiting the Book of Pain. As always, I look forward to your comments.
The photograph is entitled Long gone and was taken in a graveyard near Pomfret, CT. For more photography, please visit the Book of Bokeh.
john
Photograph, poem and notes © 2014 by John Etheridge; all rights reserved. The poem and accompanying notes are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. This applies to all original written work found on this site, unless noted otherwise. The attribution claimed under the license is: © 2014 by John Etheridge, https://bookofpain.wordpress.com. The photograph is not licensed for use or reproduction in any way, unless so granted in writing by the copyright owner.
This made me remember places where I used to play as a child, and the people who would remember them too. A lovely poem, John!
Elizabeth
Thank you Elizabeth. It *is* funny: I have been all around the world and been to so many wonderful, interesting, beautiful or arresting places…and yet there are some terribly inconsequential places from my youth that seem, for some odd reason I can not explain now, to stand out life-like in my memory still.
In a way, its nice not to be able to explain those things 🙂