Drawing by Judith Wolfe

LEONARD LAMBERT /

Four Poems


    Other Eyes

    I went to the mountain

    found a low sad hill -

    I walked among the fallen

    felt nothing at all -

    I grasped at their stories

    grabbed a handful of air -

    I fingered their treasures

    trinkets of the poor -

    But when I looked again

    when I looked with other eyes,
    clothed in spirit, cloaked in reverence, wrapped around,

    the mountain proclaimed its power
    the great dead looked out through living eyes
    the stories sang, the treasures came alive, they shone,
    and the ancient world strode past, moved on
    into future days -

    when I looked again

    when I looked
    with other eyes.

    Terminal Ruiz

    The joinery place
    below our office
    is now a neon terminal
    where Don the former foreman
    is the gleaming pro-active Manager.

    He tells me he was told
    the office will be closed
    for a couple of weeks, so no work,
    but that the new Boss
    would be in touch.

    He shakes my hand, beams,
    and flies off to succeed
    beyond my wildest.

    The new Boss never calls,
    the terminal guys move into our office
    and within the time-frame
    are trapped so many ghosts,
    a new legion of the lost,
    caught between the gone
    and other men's goals.

    I miss sawdust, woodsmells, and glue,
    but catch as I turn to go,
    on the office walls, the new graffiti –
    7'erminal Rulz.

    Grandpa's Gift

    For Turi

    He could really handle money,
    my father-in-law, he threw most of it away –
    I'd never seen this before.

    He fumbled in his pocket, it tumbled out,
    note after crumpled note, he'd fill your hand –
    what was his was yours;

    and I saw to my delight,
    he made me understand, the scraps of coloured paper
    it truly merely was.

    "Rich, eh? " I hear him say, and laugh,
    "Not anymore!" Rich all right, that man, in another
    currency, richest of all.

    In the Joinery Factory

    Here they are
    the wildest dreams
    of all the craftsmen who went before,
    the miracle machines
    swift and precise beyond belief,
    spinners of the humdrum
    cutting through the tedium
    to the true task
    of creation.

    There's a big order on –
    young Kevin's churning out table legs
    "two hundred a day! all identical
    all perfect
    all incredibly
    ugly.

    For the second death
    of the giving tree
    the spirit grieves - and for Des

    and all the long-apprenticed ones
    turning
    turning in their graves.

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