"Yet abides the fact, indeed, the same,— / You are past love, praise, indifference, blame."

New job has been eating up my brain, thus the relative lack of posts. Including, even, mentioning the new job -- it's more technical editing than writing, which is exactly where I want to be, and for a company that makes medical devices, which is good work. Lots and lots of required training, though, given being heavily regulated — thus brain.

But despite that, here's something for a Poetry Monday:


Ghost House, Robert Frost

I dwell in a lonely house I know
That vanished many a summer ago,
    And left no trace but the cellar walls,
    And a cellar in which the daylight falls,
And the purple-stemmed wild raspberries grow.

O’er ruined fences the grape-vines shield
The woods come back to the mowing field;
    The orchard tree has grown one copse
    Of new wood and old where the woodpecker chops;
The footpath down to the well is healed.

I dwell with a strangely aching heart
In that vanished abode there far apart
    On that disused and forgotten road
    That has no dust-bath now for the toad.
Night comes; the black bats tumble and dart;

The whippoorwill is coming to shout
And hush and cluck and flutter about:
    I hear him begin far enough away
    Full many a time to say his say
Before he arrives to say it out.

It is under the small, dim, summer star.
I know not who these mute folk are
    Who share the unlit place with me—
    Those stones out under the low-limbed tree
Doubtless bear names that the mosses mar.

They are tireless folk, but slow and sad,
Though two, close-keeping, are lass and lad,—
    With none among them that ever sings,
    And yet, in view of how many things,
As sweet companions as might be had.


From his first collection, A Boy's Will, near the start. That's a lot of layers of time for such a short piece.

---L.

Subject quote from "Your Last Drive," Thomas Hardy.