Passing

"Master, pity they servant ! 
He is deaf and 3 parts blind.
He cannot catch thy commandments. 
He cannot read Thy mind. 
Oh, leave him not to his loneliness; 
nor make him thy kitten scorn.
He hath none other God than Thee 
since the year that he was born . 

Lord look down on they servant! 
Bad things have come to pass. 
There is no heat in the mid-day sun, 
nor health in the way side grass. 
His bones are full of an old disease-
his torments run and increase. 
Lord, make haste with thy lightenings 
and grant him quick release."
 —-Rudyard Kipling, ‘ His Apologies ‘ 1932

3:00 a.m., the whistle blows hauntingly through a thick still night. 

I thought, how it is a reassuring sound from the past to the present,

Makes everything seem normal or at least safe as normal should feel.

The darkness allows you to pretend the sound is being made from anytime.

Time of the little brick house with wasp escaping through the stone fireplace.

Or, an infant crying to be fed and nurtured back to sleep.  

Or, the present time, the darkness allowed my thoughts to travel.

The sound allowed my mind to go on into the memories of any time before.

Sounding one last time, it disappears into nothingness and all is quiet.

Just the darkness. left from minutes past 3:00 a.m. 

Copyrighted:  2017 CMM

The fields have turned golden

the wheat now bundles in rolls

the sweet rain of autumn

will soon take its tolls

while color begins to grace

the tree line with color

the golds and the russet

the browns and yellow

I listen out to the souls who

pass into the place of places

where no one returns

and awareness erases

oh the changes of time

spread before in  splatter

to explain the passing

we ignore what matters

that autumn just is, what we

try not to see, the passing

of time, the reminder of seasons

when the colors bleed

copyrighted:  CMM  2016

The Recipe Box

Opening up the old rubbed wooden box

I smelled time lingering from recipes of the past.

Shoved into in a hurried way of schedules and life

I pulled a hand full of recipes tattered and unorganized.

Sifting through in hopes to find a recipe to add to a menu

for a friend who is sitting in a hospital room with her mate.

A mate of 50 years now succumbed to life and cancer.

I look to see which one will do, and as I do, I see names.

These were the names of friends from a lifetime,

friends who shared a moment and then left a recipe to remember.

Friends much like the ones who are holding the hand of each other

waiting for life to say good-bye until another time.

I look at the names and realize the box has become a eulogy of friends,

the recipes reflecting their personality, their smiles, their life.

I feel as though it brought me to a sacred place, of time, sharing,

a holy place of scents and smells forgotten, but not their presence.

© Copyrighted:   CMM  2015

Tick, ticking striking out of the past,
no one hears the silent sounds

of the before, setting tones of today.

Hushed noised of the irreversible day,
passable times of yore,
left only in forgotten memory.

Cobwebbed shelves building into
the minds of the ones left behind,
to sustain the awareness of time.

Rhythm, slow ticking, echoes loudly
as dusty sounds of a year
stored in moth scented rooms of the past.

Tones of hours, twisted,
tenor of richness strikes the dome
of pendulums’ sounds.

Wound springs of life, unwinding
movements in celebration of life
and the poignant tones of death.

The world evolves, revolves,
the clock ticks winding its hours
tightly around the past.

Irreversible paradox of beginnings
going toward the endings,
reaching into uncertainty.

copyrighted: CMM 2004-2005