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Frank Ormsby

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Landscape with Figures

What haunts me is a farmhouse among trees
Seen from a bus window, a girl
With a suitcase climbing a long hill
And a woman waiting.
The time the bus took to reach and pass
The lane’s entrance, nothing was settled,
The girl still climbing and the woman still
On the long hill’s summit.

Men were not present. Neither in the fields
That sloped from hedges, nor beyond the wall
That marked the yard’s limits
Was there sign of hens, or hands working.
No sight that might have softened
On the eye the scene’s
Relentlessness.

Nothing had happened, yet the minute spoke,
And the scene spoke, and the silence,
And oppressed as air does, loading
For a storm’s release.

All lanes, and houses
Secretive in trees, and gaunt hills’ jawlines
Turn my thoughts again
To that day’s journey and the thing I saw
And could not fathom.
Struck with the same dread
I seem to share in sense, not detail,
What was heavy there:
Sadness of dim places, obscure lives,
Ends and beginnings,
Such extremities.

 

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