Two Poems from a Time Far Away

Old Cemetery - Location Unknown

In the Landscape

of Your Loneliness

James Hart

In the landscape of your loneliness
the wind breaks broken songs on stones,
sings them through the shadows’ palisade
enclosing the day’s last trembling light.

Your ears catch a lost man’s troubled story
of a golden grail, a paradise of open doors,
a ring of inviting fire just out of reach
beyond the gilded clouds’ shuttered house.

A ghost’s marble veins under granite skin,
you drink the earth’s impassive weathers,
a sleeping rain, thunder shuddering blood,
sparks that jar your dream’s dark amphora.

You marvel hard paradox bound in words:
star and stone, soul and soil, seed or dead,
as you till an Eden inside rings of stone,
sow a body’s seed, grow a soul, harvest stars.

Abandoned Farmhouse - Location Unknown

In the Countryside

of the Dead

James Hart
 
Sometimes the dead
speak with the voices of stones
dropping in water like the flat
pebbles my mother taught me
to whisper gracefully across a shoal.

Somewhere the dead
live invisibly like ghost foliage
no longer gracing skeletal trees,
their small limbs, broken twigs,
rotting fingers of time shaping soil.

Somehow the dead
fleetingly outwit my eyes
and ears cocked for their hushed
movements in the roadside brush
where foxes nose frosted trails of quail.

Someday the dead
will weight my shoulders
with a woolen drift of surprise,
a clutch of pleasure, as I pull
my coat tighter against a familiar chill.


(Poems from an unpublished manuscript
entitled In the Countryside of the Dead.
All poems from this manuscript date
from the years 1995 to 2000.)