News from Undiscovered Country

Dilapidated Barn in a Field of Lilies

The Undiscovered Country

James Hart 

I drive past empty barns, listing
soliloquies along the dusty roadside,
and listen to wind whispering past
the car’s open window. I hear dim
voices once lost and found, like me,
looking for the undiscovered bourn,
the green countryside of my youth,
naming aloud the latest travelers
who have left and never returned.
They, like me, if they pass this way,
find a few barns and frameless time
overstuffed with another emptiness,
the spiders’ harvest hung among
the roofless rafters, insects bound
like filmy stars inside wilted webs.
I remember when our barn stood,
dark spaces under a leaking roof,
weathered wooden shingles letting
in sunlit threads, light like splintered
stars random as a universe overhead,
songs of wasps daubing muddy tombs,
dust rising from hay on hazy wings
undisturbed by wind’s whisperings
or cows’ shufflings in gloom below.
Whether we harvest hay or words,
time, like space, remains the same,
and changes, and the wind needs
no special destination to be a wind.
Barn or bourn, empty town or hamlet
hidden by a shady curve, we will find
our way by signs, by stones, by stars,
by sunlight setting tiny fires to hay.
We hear the harmony of our years
in the rasp of wasp, the breeze of bees,
the wind’s soliloquies in the trees,
the sighs of travelers praising shade.


(From an unpublished manuscript
entitled In the Countryside of the Dead)

Source of title:
"But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovere'd country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will . . . ."
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III

Photo from The Ozark Homestead.

http://theozarkhomestead.wordpress.com/