old

Road Towards Stasis

~ distilledvoice ~ 2 Comments

The old man watches
as time races:
all the young
frothing in its leading edge,
powerful on its surge,
the wave on which they surf:
confident like fearless children.

He was like them
in his unbeknownst youth,
careless with the ideas
of others: tossing them
for the new and exciting,
rubbishing the staid
and stilled establishment.

It irks him now,
not to see his work dismissed,
but that he has succumbed
to ageing’s inevitable drift
into beliefs hardening:
all of what he knows torn,
by the turn of the unconcerned,
from his grasp to hold it static.

© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016

Orchard

~ distilledvoice ~ 2 Comments

Six old codgers
Wizened as the crooked years
And mottled with age pigment
Lean on the honey stone wall
Resting their swollen joints.
Their feet are slippered in the grass
And feel the settled earth of the village,
Cradled in the seasons and strewn with
Apple blossom, windfall or crisp autumn leaf.
It’s spring now
And daffodils, yellow upon the pasture
Make good on the bulb planter’s promises,
And cowslips, mild in the moss,
Peep for the buttermilk light.
The old boys lean and watch,
Pondering as their grandfathers did
And the grandfathers before that.

© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016

Journey

~ distilledvoice ~ Leave a comment

Where is the boy lost
In the journey to the man?
Where is the balance point
In which he slips in metamorphosis
Through youth toward old age,
In transit of time’s
Morphing body become?

Perhaps he is not lost
But changed in skin
And greying hair
And stiffness in the bones,
The boy alive
But draped in memory’s
Encrustations
That sway the free thoughts
Of boyish dreams
From all their boyish freedoms.

© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016

So Slowly

~ distilledvoice ~ Leave a comment

IMG_2257

So slowly
Yet the years pass by
And old roads
Enveloped
By the seasons fruit
And fallen leaves
Brought down
To the carpeting ground
Are each year
Millimetres closer
To the countryside,
As new formed earth,
Like age rings
Of the tree,
Mark the cycle
By their regular encroachment.

It is thus
That our histories
Are buried.
And time is immeasurable
As it flows
Sometimes slowly
And other times
Like a swift tide,
Our ancestors
Sunk in the mud
Of generations,
As the millimetres
Have built
To the platform
On which
Life now resides

And finds us alive,
Upon the skin
Of now happening
But with deep roots
Drawing and sucking
On the layered sediments
Of history
And all those
Dead ideas.

© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015