First appeared in [Word]: A Journal of Canadian Poetry, Winter, 2010.
ONCE YOU LEAVE
you won’t come back: not to those hills
mythic in sun-wash stretching to sea,
not to the sheer greens of meadows
their denizens cud-drunk with that abundance,
not to the harbour wall’s gradual curve
that outreaching moon-hook of stone.
The scarp and pocked rock face will remain,
trees will hold their leaves to the same sun,
houses will creak foundations, lean away.
These things will forget you, viewed
from afar: your features strange as wanting.
They will set your form with a name
for it’s been so long and the world is bent
on change, the kind that creeps a deep past
desolate of you. No you won’t come back.
But someone very like you: like enough to think
those hills remain poised in welcome,
do not turn granite backs on you.
Stephen Rowe, 2010
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