My View by Michael Garrad; poems, Soldier and Whispers.

My View with Michael Garrad
Yes, you’re more than likely right - the older we get, the more precious the memories.
It’s as if it was yesterday, crystal clear and, perhaps, modified slightly for our own pleasure.
It’s that one special moment or moments that are hidden safely in the mind until, for whatever reason, a very real picture is triggered - or that picture can be the fuse which ignites recollection and the wonders of imagination.
In a split second, it’s a return to childhood or those hazy, summer-drenched adolescent years - a picnic in the local park or that first realisation that when boy meets girl, it can be quite exciting. Exquisite even!
These camera captures are precious as rubies because they’re part of us, of who we are, and we can touch that frame of time - live it and savour it, and know that it did happen so very long ago!
How many seasons have gone by? It doesn’t really matter because that season is now.
Soldier
The long savage day
cuts ice-cold to the heart,
Urgent breeze shapes tears,
Stings eyes that cannot close,
Bitter is the harvest on the hill,
And windmill turns without rhythm,
Slices freeze air until turmoil is a gale,
This dark monument to withered corn
that waved goodbye before morn
had breathed on aching clouds;
Hurricane blows on urgent waterfalls,
Frozen fingers grasp at rotting reeds
and scale, insidiously, the tall bark,
As a soldier on dead feet.
© Michael Garrad September 2010
Whispers
Ghosts in a cacophony of whispers,
Long after machine-din
has spun, controlled, in death throes,
Echoing in cold, salty air,
Carried a-top mountain waves
and put quietly to rest
in distant, howling ocean gale,
Now shadows trick the eye
against grey, monument walls
seeped in history’s damp,
Perhaps these shadows
dance to sun’s whim;
Shoe leather is as dust
in forgotten corridors
and dead laneways,
So many people, back and forth,
Feeding starved mechanical creations
in a frenzied hunger,
Cruel the appetite,
Even when others slept,
The roar silenced conversation,
And humanity ducked and weaved
in endless, tedious shifts,
Until exhaustion and slumber,
Until it all began again,
Hear the hush of silence now,
Was that a tree branch as finger
pointing in winter light?
Imagination, memory’s re-birth?
Or are these shadows much more?
© Michael Garrad August 2010