The Moments

Doug Bolling

It would be evening soon and
We walked among yellowing willows
As shadows motioned from their
Deft hiding places among the
Wind blown sand dunes.
What are our words you said into
The hollows of spaces surrounding us.
What is their reach as they slip from
Tongues into the blue dark ever
Lastingness of an hour or a century.
We came as beginners still making
A world from the quiltings of youth,
The regimen invented by parents
As they aged into statuary we would
Never be able to buy.
Somewhere ahead a future in its
Bounty, roads waiting for us if we
Dare the unknowns, can put past
And present and future together,
Face moments when no answers
Come.

We stood on the shore listening
To the outgoing tide, the silences
Trailing behind.

0ut of the sea the flight of gulls
Suddenly overhead, their eyes
Fastened to ours, their brazen
Screechings shaping the dusk.

*This poem first appeared in a slightly different version under the title “Passage” in the print edition of The Rockford Review.

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Author’s note:

How this poem developed I can’t easily explain. Long years of closeness to nature beginning in childhood and continuing. Walking deep into woods and knowing sudden fear of lostness along with an intense joy. And the sea. My first view of it was in Virginia Beach on a snowy cold weekend. I got a ride from William and Mary and hitchhiked back on a wintry Sunday evening. The poem is a mix of numerous revisions and intimations beyond those. But these are only words. Better go. I hear Mother Gaea calling.

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Doug Bolling’s poetry has appeared in Posit, Slant, The Inflectionist Review, About Place Journal, Kestrel, Connecticut River Review and Birmingham Arts Journal, among others. He has received Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations and several awards and is a native of Kentucky now living next door to Chicago. He is a graduate of William and Mary and has graduate degrees from Iowa.