This is a poem which I found among my mother’s things. She wrote a number of very beautiful poems, some complex and some simple. In her memory I intend to post them over the next year. I love this simple one as it is so haunting. It was probably written during WWII when so many young men were being killed.

Two things to us come not again –
The love denied,
The opportunity forgone.
Fate will deride
The penance paid in useless tears,
Drowning our laughter.
These things to us come not again.
Their loss, irreparable, in vain
Clings gnawing the relentless years
That follow after.

The Cliffs of Moher are located at the southwestern edge of the Burren region in County Clare, Ireland They rise from 390 to 702 ft above the Atlantic Ocean and receive almost one million visitors a year. The poem addresses the uncanny urge to jump off which many of us experience when we encounter a high place.

A man walks on the edge of the world,
Along the cliffs of Moher,
Poised between land and ocean.
A wild bewitching place.
The wind whispers in his ears.
The waters roar for his attention.
Looking down he sees,
The sea swelling and shrinking,
Nursing and caressing the rocks,
Crowning them with white halos.
And he casts a stone,
Falling, down, down, down,
Down into the secret emerald under the sea,
To disappear forever.

Quickly, he averts his eye,
To see the cliffs and sky.
Lethal, black, rugged cliffs,
Obstacles menacing, unclimbed.
And he continues along the edge,
His feet on springy sea grass,
He smells cattle in fields.
But still the sea beckons with a moan.
So, mesmerized, he turns his eye,
Down again to the waves below.
And then, he, following his gaze,
Falls like a stone, down, down,
Down off the edge of his world,
Into oblivion.

This poem was inspired by the poignant and disturbing photographs which a friend of ours took when he visited the Gonzales Jail which is now a museum. The Museum web site sports less troubling photographs. Our friend’s pictures showed the graffiti laden walls, covered with men’s names and dates and scratch marks for counting time together with the hangman’s noose and the trap door below it. They told of a cold menacing place in which misery and death went hand in hand.

Gonzales Jail, a museum now,
Displays a legacy of past sorrow.
Visitors view graffiti-laden walls,
Walk its echoed hell of halls,
Gaze at hard steel and stone,
Feel the anguish of men, now gone.
Men whose only claim to fame,
Is a date, a place, a name,
Carved upon the unforgiving face,
Of this impenetrable place.

The inquiring visitor can feel,
Ghosts slipping past bars of steel.
The seeker may catch unawares,
Phantoms slithering thru’ steel squares.
Dead spirits weeping, crying,
Their incarceration now defying.
The queasy voyeur may get more,
Grim Reaper lurking at gallows’ floor,
Hangman’s noose in the hand of death,
Object of many a man’s last breath.

The walls remember the moaning,
Each jailed man’s private groaning.
Their faces carry a record of stays,
Scratched bars ticking off sad days.
Justice’s walls held men within,
To pay society their debt of sin.
Now open, walls greet visitor, seeker,
Ghost, phantom and Grim Reaper
With equal stony hard defiance,
And an eternity of silence.

This poem was ‘commissioned’ by Dan who has fond memories of the joy of spending time on the warm south side of a haystack. I found the Villanelle form challenging but think that it is a suitable form for the message of this poem.

Sun-coddled, leeward, I hide.
A haystack, my hasty home,
Sitting snug, on the south side.

The arctic air blasts far and wide,
But I escape its biting moan.
Sun-coddled, leeward, I hide

Sleepy, bless’d, I abide,
Adopt the stack as mine alone,
Sitting snug, on the south side.

No special secrets to confide,
Nothing to say that is unknown.
Sun-coddled, leeward, I hide.

Peace rests here at my side,
Eternity and I, alone.
Sun-coddled, leeward, I hide,
Sitting snug, on the south side