Longueville

Conspicuous as a sonnet, I pass through
shadows. I do not know their names and
I decide not to count. There are so many
going up the hill and back, alongside the
vein of meadowsweet and loam. They are
a forest. They are a frost. I am their field.
Each ancestor rising one summer higher
in a line, planted along the rutted road
which is now a footpath for fewer and
fewer.

It was a Roman lane, their tomb a mound
sprouting yew and laurel, pregnant two
thousand years. They return to recall as do
their descendants, my ancestors. One day,
my daughter will come here and tell this
story to her grandchildren, and they will
sit within my shade and shiver with
mysteries as she, three months old today,
looks up my tall, deciduous body into
leaves.


* Longueville is a medieval French, now Belgian, village
founded by the Romans, inhabited by my family since
at least the early eighteenth century.





Longueville [#2]
© 2008 Fammerée


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Richard Fammerée
fammeree@att.net
director@universeofpoetry.org


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