Today I really feel the seasons changing. Change is good, disruptive, rejuvenating, difficult. From simply having to move your desk at work to a new location…to loosing a loved one. Change is everywhere and ignites emotions, creating opportunities to pump our next moves with reflections, accounts that drive the best in us.
In addition to the warm sun, smell of cut grass and sounds of spring around the corner, I found two things today: 1) a poem my uncle read at my dad’s funeral service last month and 2) a poem I wrote 15 years ago, just out of college digging my North Beach beat life in San Francisco. Both have that mix of melancholy and inspiration stirring inside me today.
Death is nothing at all…
I have only slipped away into the next room.
I am I, and you are you.
Whatever we were to each other, that we are still
Call me by my old familiar name,
Speak to me in the easy way you alwsys used.
Put no differnece into your tone
Wear no forced air of sorrow.
Laugh as we always laughed
at the little jokes we enjoyed together.
Play, smile, think of me, pray for me.
Let my name be ever the housefold word that it always was
Let it be spoken without effort,
without the ghost of a shadow on it.
Life means all that it ever meant.
It is the same as it ever was;
there is absolutely unbroken continuity…
Why should I be out of your mind because I am out of sight?
I am waiting for you for an interval,
Somewhere very near, just around the corner.
All is well.
— Henry Scott Holland, English clergyman, First World War, slightly adapted
A Denizen’s Dream
We are all breeders sparing time for change
We seek destinations, resolutions
But memories are made from the travel between
Interludes of intra-interpersonal interpretations
So much passes with silence
Becoming habbits and addictions
Fixations that unveil the mask of true ignorance
Eyes drooping
Nostrils relaxed
and tongue hanging agape dry and white
I languish in the thought
The dank doldrums wherein we stay steeped so spiraling…
Licking lips to keep a head up
While knee deep in purposeless splendor
Like the unfathomable delight of a denizen’s drive
Dreaming of talks
We’ve had in teh future
Face forward
A jettison through the breeze
— Ken E Kaplan, North Beach in San Francisco, CA, October 12, 1993
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