An ode to Shakespeare and Barfield…
Not rubble, but root
not the toppled arch, nor the cold stone
marked by lichen and crow,
but the deeper disintegration,
the fall inward where sweetness
becomes sediment, layered,
compost of memory.
Ruin, the old word,
not only decay, but rushing,
the cataract, the river’s surrender
to gravity and sea.
So Shakespeare’s grief,
the “ruin of a sweet life,”
is not just the breaking,
but the swift carrying away…
an eddy, a flood.
And Barfield reminds:
words remember what we forget.
Ruin, from ruina, the collapse,
yet also the running course,
the onward plunge.
Not merely wreckage,
but motion.
Not death, but migration.
So my sweet life,
lived among walnut trees,
between baptisms and poems,
with children’s laughter,
with books that smell of rain,
ruin comes not as thief,
but as torrent:
the unmaking
that remakes.
Here in this homeland,
the sweet ruin of tobacco fields
gives way to pine,
and Cherokee memory rustles
in leaves that still refuse erasure.
Even the cross,
that ruined tree,
bears sap enough
to green the nations.
Ruin is not only ending.
It is the opening,
the washed-out ditch
through which a future grows in weeds.
Sweetness is not lost,
but borne away
to mingle with ocean salt,
to rise again in storm,
to fall as rain on the waiting earth.