The shadows have grown

Maybe you want to talk
but you always talk,
to rinse my mind of memory

• its yesterday -
  and fill it with tomorrow,
  and tomorrow is love and a car
  which is why you love me.

There are shadows
in the back of my mind
that have grown out of my youth,
my youth you'll never know.

If you go back to the gum trees
on the hills of Natal
where nobody goes looking for love,
unless love is forlorn regret.

The tall trees in blue-green rows,
the creaking up above;
the echoing voices of the spirit of the trees;
the trees grown out of the earth
the military rows of straight straight trunks
grown over a forgotten past,
blue-green underfoot.

Now if you walk
beneath the blue gum trees,
above the debris on the fertile earth,
there are places with piles of stone,
that the labourers add to in remembrance,
and if you dig a bit,
shall find ploughed-in bone,
that at first, look like bits of wood.

No, the trees are a poor illusion
for those who would not die, the wood is not wood;
they remember the legends too.

There is tomorrow I guess,
in which these things can be forgotten,
there is the prosperity of tomorrow,
which these trees are grown and felled for …

We're all people
when the sun is shining,
but they shall not forget being like animals.
We may not have grown old
by the time the shadows
of the mind
have grown into night.
I may be like the fertile
spring flowers of the field
that forgot to go to seed.
I may forget to plant myself.
I may forget to plant trees.

There may be no tomorrow,
if you don't rinse yesterday from my mind.

For you I may still forget.