A dark horizon against a starry night. Photo: By Ali via Unsplash.
Poem: Still life
'Your presence quietly breathing here in grey light...'
Your presence quietly breathing here in grey light,
is a shadow cast on a wafted veil of days.
Past times you flagged your banners over brigands,
canyons, deserts, fires, fields of war,
even braved grizzlies in the forests
of the Rocky Mountains as you sang
so sweetly through twilight trees, railroad trains
heaving echoes out of sidings way below.
When two volcanoes join at Grindavik
magma is an avalanche of brimstone,
welding roads and townships into one confusion
of past and future. Larks may no longer sing
above the fires where iron teapots melt and rafters
flare in altered rock. But that’s the fate of all things
living, and a joy of time’s incomprehensible power.
It is the universe and all it holds from galaxy
to the wheel of stars. It captures you and me in this,
a glance of light, a moment in the dawn grey
with nothing of a guarantee of what may yet become
of us, the brimming clouds, miraculous suns.
‘Still life’ was Roger's last contribution to the Friend, shortly before his death in December.
