The Chimney

I’ve come back to the place where I had grown, a place no more as it once was known. Not a roof, not a room, not one wall left, just an old, weathered chimney standing alone. An ill-tempered wind swept from the hillside tops that spun relentlessly through the leafless copse and across fallow fields long now disused that once had yielded sustaining crops. The skies oblique with murmurations of small black birds that, without hesitation, alit, then rose in tornadic swirls of airborne dances without cessation. A tractor sat solemnly by a clattering gate now a rusted reminder that time won't wait. And the path that wound to the moldering shed overrun with thistles that sealed its fate. And where once stood the old front door now just a cracked and crumbled floor. Then, as I turned and faced the chimney tall, familiar voices resonated once more. Though perceived, still filled with laughter and childlike questions of timeless matter from a once-close family about the hearth brought a blissful end to life’s daily chapter. I stood silently, my senses sublimely allured, while present time was much obscured; my melancholic thoughts embraced those voices from the hearth I heard. Then, all illusions gone, the chimney tall seemed out of place without a wall, without a family ‘round it girthed, a silent sentinel that should never fall. I turned and walked, my thoughts unspoken, and knew well now the chains were broken; but though the chimney, which stood unscathed, meant nothing more than memory’s token. John Henry Gardner © 2017 – All rights reserved