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Friday, June 5, 2015

Poem ---- Jerry Austin


Within And Beyond

Ten acres to explore--my grandfather's land.
Ten more--my Uncle Ernie's adjacent land.

How can one's mind narrow while roaming
twenty acres of forest and fields, like
watching the night sky fill with its lights?
How when watching an Alligator Lizard

spiral audibly down a cedar stump the summer
has dried? I celebrated the tanager colors
of June, and wanted to retain
their fervid dance, their motions near the trunks.

Always I have longed for their river of flight
and the light-filled leaves stranding down
from the alders, the big alders, and the rare birch.

Now other lessons abound. It is as if, as one looks back
on one's life, that river of high mountains
in its descent, and revisits mistakes
one would give years of life to alter,

so it is that we look at our life from outside
our life, and find lessons as if for another's
life--a continuation of our own, or
a psyche wholly other, that differs as birch

from stone, or mountain from dream, or
time from time in another place. But the lesson
learned remains, a permanence of information.

Always I have sought the glacier beauty
because I have seen the glacier; and the rural
cicada because I'd heard its song, and the horse
snorting as he steps to the fence to take

the apple from my hand. There is a reaching
out, a desperate need to reach out from within--
one's own mind seeks it and has always sought it
though it lay hidden like the shadows of a barn

or the long shadow of a mountain.

Jerry Austin / 5 May 2015


2 comments:

  1. One of the finest poems by our editor-at-large and assistant poetry editor, Jerry Austin.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Koon, Thank You. Your suggestions to revise this piece were helpful and motivational. I now see places where I need to revise my other four pieces further below. Jerry

    ReplyDelete