THE PASTURE

THE PASTURE

The olden days are comforting, memory/ that exists with no mind to box it in, /a pasture. --- From “Olden Days” by Hannah Stephenson, posted 09-12-11 in The Storialist.

Olden days as a pasture---an expanse

of growth and green alive to laughter

and song---that’s where I am going. 

Where windswept bramble rustle

with grass, you will find me there.

I can’t be rushed to skip off beyond. 

I have time to paint a collage of faces

I have known in the deep mosaic

of a past now graffitied on these walls. 

Isn’t this why we hoard our memories?

We carry them like playing marbles

in pockets over our hearts, an easy draw 

when the game is called, a quick toss

into holes dug on dirt we crawl on like

the kids we were, rolling them to dusk. 

Olden days are there to sieve through

to find markers along obscured paths

once brightly lit now lost or darkened. 

A smile after a first kiss would help me

remember there are caresses there

as indelible, as urgent, as when first 

given or surrendered by the one lover

whose courage saw me through times

when absconding was an easy way out. 

A rollicking hug from the boisterous

son, a lonely issue, my only boy, recalls

a hesitant embrace for my dying father 

who whispered from his rocking chair

my schoolboy snivelling was poor form,

he needed a man’s goodbye. Goodbye. 

The litter of olden days strewn like dry

leaves along my walk home holds me

back, awake again: I do not want to go.

---Albert B. Casuga

09-12-11