A Walk

A Walk

Walking along the high road, I stopped to take in the spire of a 14th century church, Gothic architraves and reliefs, weathered, silhouetted against the sky, the slow clouds rolling like cotton wool across a light azure heaven. I noted the old elm before the spire as i looked up, and wondered how many others had noticed the spire had been rebuilt,  sporting a masonic compass and square beneath the cross that sat atop the sky.

An old gaslight, no longer illumined in the daylight, stood before the tree, and i breathed in the whole scene, as the mad rush pelted the walkways around me. Ants scurrying about, desperately fighting the time.

Easing my camera from my pocket, i took one of two shots, up into the sky, and adjusted my straw hat, so as to shield the naked sun from my eyes.

I noted an older lady pass me by, and thought for a second that she wanted to say something, but the moment passed, and she moved on, resigned to her silence. So i called after her; 'Glorious weather we are having isn't it?', she stopped in her tracks, and turned, her elderly wrinkles smiling at me from out the years.

An hour later, we had both enriched each others day. I had learnt all about her time in Sicily, and the Belfast dockyards. How she had been evacuated in the war as a young child and seen dogfights in Irish skies, Mafia dons with blackened eyes, and the history of the inception of that shadow organization from the perspective of an Irish woman who had married a Sicilian man, living in foreign lands, with her babies eyes staring into other skies.

'Time winnows us all through its great sieve,
and Shiva's dance destroys even the fleeting memories,
wrapped up in past joys,
and tied in the bow of contentment.
All that's left us are the token gestures in a stream,
passing endlessly before us.

A tipple from a draft of the ever fluid past,
slipping in sips, through the rivulets of your mind.
When even memories, become mixed and mingled,
will you still recall the moment of our calling?

or..., like the passing throng,
washed endlessly along,
will the memory simply pass you by,
swept aside, Lost...
like all those feelings, laughed or cried,
until at last, I too become lost,
a remnant of the past, an unremembered cost.'

Taking the time, to make a little time...

© Richard Michael Parker 2012