Cantus

I feel the wind hone my forty years
the chimes chatter like miscast runes
the sloe-berries ripen from grave hardness.

If paving stones were neat
I could walk this colossal boned earth
for centuries.

If the rain stayed away
I could malinger more time,
exhume a thousand years

of basal roots ringed
with memory. But the far, big-boned hills
glower on my mortality,

frown thunder. My plot of
wet world erodes, my
lip of land over the sea

shall be fallen, sculpted
by histrionic surf
into gravel.

Robert James Berry

If you've any comments on this poem, Robert James Berry would be pleased to hear from you.