I've become the old guy

the present of both past and future

while I wasn’t quite noticing,

I have endured, at least for now,

and I’ve become the old guy,

the one with all the stories

no one much wants to hear,

almost as if it’ll take my death

to make an absence

so that belatedly they’ll want my presence,

that’s how it’s happened for me with older relatives,

by the time I want to learn from them

they aren’t there to teach me,



when you endure

there are a lot of goodbyes to also endure,

I love to remember,

to hear the history that the present remembers

if we but look with the right eye,

listen with the right ear,

I am drawn to the lines of rock walls

where need and art wrote in stone,

to streams whose light chuckle

calls up the sculptor’s deep-throated laugh

at the heart of falling water,

I am drawn to great trees

whose roots and trunk remember much:

a pine tree pioneers upon the land

and follows broom sedge and blackberry

when cornfields are left to fallow,

deciduous trees come next

as oak and maple and poplar crowd out most of the pine,

along the creek this pine endures with buckeye and a beech,

the wind of a winter storm breaks it down,

and its fall forces other trees and us to notice,

pine cones crowd its upper branches

as one last gift to the future,

as winter lurches slowly to spring

flowers will almost leap from the ground,

and in their evanescent freshness thrill whoever finds them,

for me, I cannot understand how one cannot be drawn

to both the past that stretches before us

and to the future that will stretch into the indefinite after us,

and, for me, I will marvel at every flower I find

and at every young person with whom I have the honor to work.

by Henry Walker

February 28, ’13