What Can You See When It’s Gone
This morning, I set about to write a blog on the writing of poems inspired by growing up on the farm and instead I ended up writing a poem. In the poem, there is a reference to a wild sheep roaming the forests outside of Melbourne Australia. That detail is based upon a story in the papers concerning a wild ram gone wool blind with a 77-pound fleece captured and shorn and thereby rescued from almost certain death. This sheep is a metaphor for memory, the burden and the blessing, the blindness and the sight.
What Can You See When It’s Gone
when you look to the top of the hill
where the barns
used to be on the farm
those black buildings
loom in the mind
dark memory
that billows
where phantom storm stains an old sky
like the oil you can’t wash
from blue cloth
and the ghost fog of sheep
are grazing gone grass
and eating the windfalls away
where the tree lost its apples
in autumn
one thought at a time
if the mist in the meadow
is cold in the winter
as frost that clings to wet wool
and warm
in the vanishing dawn
was it there
like a voice from the grave
both the wind in the weather
that worries the rain
in the name on a stone
and the name it is wearing away …
near Melbourne Australia
in the forests of night
they found a wild ram
gone blind in his burden of wool
his fleece curling over his face full as thunder
and oh when you’re lost
and oh, when you’re found
can you see
where you were
when where you once were isn’t there
John B. Lee
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