Counting Days
In how many ways do I count the days
Those passing golden days we said were ours,
The warm bright days and the slow dulled days
The eternal rhythm of passing hours.
Those familiar travelled paths and ways,
The greeting and reluctant parting time,
The lost numbers of the forgotten days
Calm days of unchronicled silent time.
Mist shrouded days; days that are sharp and clear,
The unlisted quiet and the busy time,
The memory visited far past years
The doing nothing and the resting time.
Barry Stebbings
Oct 2024
Categories:
unchronicled, introspection,
Form: Quatrain
Upon fields ripe with earth, alone we lay,
yearning the foretold birth of a brighter day,
far beneath the heavens' maw,
nearer the crystal seas and her luminescent shore
we await the light we've grown to adore.
The sands, the dunes, were wet with waters crystalline,
of fragrant colours like none thou have seen,
a place not before we have been,
yet forever enamoured by vistas holy and serene.
The beauty, slowly, began to decay,
Slowly, we realize the sun would never rise, nor surmise,
the delivery of another day.
And so, it ended and began rather forlorn,
Ailing no array of light, no sun, no dawn.
Instead darker, if not colder too,
the shadows of night so continued to brew,
birthing horrors unchronicled, unexplained and new.
How could we have known, or have ever knew,
That the Sun would die, birthing a darkness anew?
Categories:
unchronicled, adventure, angst, dark, eulogy,
Form: Narrative
Have we, in our wanderings through
storied lands, tramped upon
purple earth cradling the sleep of kings?
Perhaps, far beneath our ambling feet,
in crypts sealed by the amnesia of centuries,
in sarcophagi dusted with a memory of pomp,
there have been tyrants who lay with nightmares,
though long freed from the reign of maggots?
Have we stood, unknowing, above
the dried husk of a despot,
his memory scattered, yet
his hand still sticky with the blood of a thousand foes
and the quavering kisses of knights and cardinals?
Have our voices disturbed the secret repose
of a czar or caesar who was not sufficiently brutal
to slaughter hope or outlaw love?
Maybe our footsteps, soft as they were,
have echoed the roaring hooves of an army
sent to war not for rubies or territories,
but a woman’s heart?
And when you and I passed through,
on our wanderings across these storied, hoary lands,
we were two unchronicled drifters,
accidentally crowned by a wakeful moon above,
and, below, so much kingly slumber.
Categories:
unchronicled, history, journey, love, moon,
Form: Free verse