the Greenhouse

Ambling there on country roads,
mossy stonewalls hemming,
remembering Frost’s ‘something there is
that doesn’t love a wall’.
Here in a Yankee autumn strolling
tree-tunnelled twisting lanes,
private and recluse ante-bellum estates
reveal themselves beyond the guarding stones.
On these estates, made richer on fratricidal profits,
men here indulged their leisure pursuits
and prayed for more exsanguinations,
then went the way of annual flowers.

Fashions changed and generations lost memory.
So now the wandering along laneways
exposes outbuildings abandoned over time,
museums of decay,
begging exploration by passers-by,
despite threatening rusted signs
and the doing of trespass.

Camouflaged by wisteria and dogwoods
grown most of seven score,
there lies a greening temple where
soot and dust and leaf litter
obscure whatever is unbroken and still in place.
Shards of glass –
broken of storms and fallen branches,
of pinecones and stones
thrown by boys without knowledge –
lie under the debris of
multi-generational neglect.

Enter this gallery of etched glass
and a thousand eyes follow silent,
pleading for remembrance and release
from this place – once green –
of forgotten lives.

Some panes remain intact,
images faded by sun and weather.
Men with guns and uniforms,
and mounted troops, generals, and
mere boys kitted out with drums.
A history lesson unseen by those
who never once saw old photographic plates.

This greening temple when new
grew verdant life so organised.
Now wild green things inhabit where
a systematic man once propagated
his imported flora.
Rarer still, these photographic plates,
slices of time, epitaphs and tombstones
faded and ethereal,
victims now
as much as the people etched upon them.

To amble country roads
and twisting lanes in a Yankee autumn
is to find social treasures
untreasured,
purchase of sanguinary profits,
fragile as life,
lying forgotten as others
grow richer on current wars.


James Gagiikwe © 2008