NOTE TO SELF
To be old and not to feel it is a gift.
To be supplanted and not to care. So be it.
The birds are not supplanted by the air,
the air, what’s left of it, by flood or fire.
The effort of a life, the wasted hour,
the kind word given to a stranger’s child
are understood as kin and disappear.
Time to be grass again. Ongoing. Wild.
—from Rattle #69, Fall 2020
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David Mason: “Momentous events occasioned these poems. I am retiring from teaching after 30 years, and I am immigrating to Australia, specifically my wife’s home island, Tasmania. The journeys involved are retrospective, involved with summing up and moving on. In both of these poems, identity dissolves, as if change itself were rubbing away old delusions. Or so it seems.”
