Return

RETURN Nothing has changed here. Nothing at all. Everything looks Just as it did before I went away. Here is the usual earth, The indifferent birds, the greetings casual as the skies, The surly loneliness of guarded mirth. And here is the spring I have always known. Flowers explode Ancestral joy from folded thunder of the hills. Rain, In timeless deference, flows ointment or acid on the spendthrift year. Here is autumn's new presentiment of old pain. I meet in the deadened streets, or country lanes, the customary faces, Lighted with wonder or broken with wonder, all wanderers in the trance Of individual time. If some have died, I do not know. Their places Have been filled by others directed from a similar stance. Here, where once I dreamed the lasting leaf while seasons dissolved Like stain in the phenomenal year's clear circuit, the bridge may fall In the slow earthquake of decay, and going away I may come again Unworshipful to all but essences, but saying now I can say forever: This is the way it was when I was here before. If surfaces Have changed, even if the buildings have weathered, I cannot tell. The willows may have gained a little more or less of shore. The river flows on, tethered in its ancient, ignorant spell. —Al Stewart 61 ...