In the ancient
city mounds of
the Middle East,
flat layers of mud,
one on top of
the other, are the
squashed remains
of houses and streets,
flat like pages in
a history book,
the lives of people
in each generation,
reduced to a few
inches of mud
baked in a thousand
years of Sun days.
In my memory
houses I have
lived in, one after
the other, from child
to old man,
are also flat pages;
all those years of
rich living, of friends
and family, of sadness
and joy, in sickness
and in health, all
compressed into
a few ghostly
thin memories,
dried by the heat
of life as lived.
nomdeplume 