Gael Turnbull
A Rattle of Scree
A lifetime away. New voices, faces,
tongues in the strrets, and I
marvel at what brought them, need
or greed, compulsion, even hope,
all familiar enough; and thus we are
not altogether strangers, belonging
to the same absence, sharing
in what also took me, left me
even from myself sometimes estranged.
When I envy an old friend
who's never lived anywhere else,
knowing one place that knows him
as its own, he grins, "Don't be misled.
Though never shifted, didn't need to.
All done for me. Here's gone.
Elsewhere's arrived. What was, isn't.
What is, won't be. No one belongs.
We're all misplaced now."
last updated May 15, 2003