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Stories of Love and Love Poems: No Dust Settles by Paul McCafferty

No Dust Settles by Paul McCafferty

No dust settles on that place.
The old place,the new one.
Though trees have stretched and grass has grown around flowers opened
to the sun.
No other feet have walked there.
Often I hear the song of wee birds that tweet
about our ancient home.
I have seen so many cities come and go.
Sudden images slip to the front of my minds Cinematographe.
It started as a picture of two young lovers.
Two in time by a deep river.
In forests, basket making, fruit collecting, fishing silver fish, dreaming only of one another.
She bore me children.
She, tribal garland maker, potion mixer, me,
a dream chanter, we, song givers of the tribe.
With loud praises for the Sun dances.
Making sounds from the first known language.
New words formed entirely for those songs.
I whispered how more gracious she than Moon.
How more sensuous to my eyes, than any bird of paradise.
All I do has overtones of that shared joy.
We kissed first by that life enhancing river.
We’d crouched down low, close together, bringing out baskets of fish.
It was evening, I had happened to turn, smiling, seeing the big moon shine in her eyes, she smiled too, seeing it in mine.
That was the first ever kiss.
We have known this love through all of time, each drawn to song, making rhymes. And so it is, with one anothers praise, we have wound through history
like one single interlocking phrase.
Separated at times in different days, stranger lives.
Learning down the faulty years that something echoes from our tears.
I have heard it often, under trees or at my computer desk each April,
a singing behind my silences, like the scent of something once well known.
My mind gets drawn out to fields, it sets me wondering again on forest paths where I gaze up at green canopys, our first roof.
I sometimes sit by streams or forest pools remembering what I thought unreal. Then tuck away in heart and head, something that will not be dead.
A wispy mental photograph of that first kiss.
I think that’s why I often get compulsed to write of love that’s brand spankin new.
Ten thousand years, spent loving you.

Paul McCafferty, February, 2014

Paul McCafferty, Glasgow Writer

This section: Love Poems, Stories and Tales from Glasgow writers, Poetry, stories and poems