Landmark
There is that tree I ate from as a child
But cannot recognize again
Who planted it? What season will the leaves,
Foolish like a cotton candy clown,
Seduce my tongue to chase
Deprived succulence of fruit or flower?
I could wither things in a foreign place
But this home,
Why am I sensed as such an alien here?
The tree and I
Have a common bond,
An aniquity of inadequacy; a man's native home
Should be as simple as his native land -
O that I could be born again there,
The first place of my ancestors' first tear!
We do not cry
Until we lose ourselves in the emptinesss of our being,
I know, I know, I know!
That pain has an echo,
A ghost that haunts the tree with fictive green:
See, only superficially we can belong.
ii
A landmark is not
For things we lost, but the self
That we cannot find
Those things that we mark
Are always there, but we stray
In new memory
The ones they create
For people displaced like sand dunes
In the void of faith.
Copyright © David Smalling | Year Posted 2012
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