Voices

People.
Like people I once knew,
Fathers and mothers,
Spoke to me again.

Voices,
Which time had worn away,
Echoed like memory
In the space between us.

As if the leaves,
Worn September leaves,
Still held on to life,
Death-defying in their high trees.

Long-lost souls returned
To their long-drawn place,
Turned imagined footsteps
Home.

Birds of park and wood,
Hoolet, cushat and peewit
Circled out of sight
From a dim-remembered place.

Mist on the far hill
Came like smoke
And went like the clouds
Leaving at sunset.

The wind rose and fell
Twisting leaves into rain
Beech, rowan, aspen, flakes of winter,
Long-gone, but coming soon.

Those voices, so old,
So full of heart,
Spoke as if nothing at all
Had withered in the glen.

Those voices, so bright,
Were yesterday for us
Dust in our fingers
Falling like the crumbling earth,
The crumbling earth that years become.

© BH 2012

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Another 'response' poem, this time to Gill Russell's Where Long Shadows Fall installation at Glenbuchat. It's actually nearly six months later, but a response is a response.  It was actually a snatch of video I took on my visit that caught my attention. The mist was like smoke in the air, especially in close-up. The voices in the audio were like those I grew up hearing. That was a while ago now.