Scatter - My Best Lines

Scatter away, my children.

In five million years,
You and I will be echoes in space.
Stars that died yesterday
Will twinkle on,
Phantom lights for a phantom world.

She had not asked him to die for her.
But then, she hadn’t asked
Him to live for her, either.

I remember when they
And this house
Were young,
Like the sweet prairie grass
Of my childhood.

Rainy days are like funerals.

He wants to be a fire-fighter when he comes home
And I can’t help thinking
How good that would look on an obituary.

Everything is different; I am sharp edges, inside.

As the ghosts flared out
In the green, green dawn.

The stars we do not recognize shine merrily in the sky
On foreign soil, they did not know, their children came to die.

Count your fifty million paces
And then lie down in the earth.

I see only
Dry dirt
Ancient graves
A tumbleweed sky –

And the walls just get smaller.

And then it will be over
Like a shadow passing over the sun
As the young shout in the night
And the old reminisce
In the faded streets
Of Heaven.

Where the world’s still green
In the pre-machine

the rain is coming in
that’s silly, she says – there are no windows
but I can’t hear her for the pounding in the walls

It’s the only sound in the world,
And way down by the end of forever,
Someone is sending back the echo.

caught under glass
shattered and bleeding water onto the earth

When I wake in the morning
And the moon is yet out
I can’t hear fate’s whisper
Nor turn it about

Lazier than smoke, spinning off in the sunshine
As we sang like kings under the grass.

The bat gleams like victory
in the sunlight.

they are as clear as the sky
in this Minamata morning

If nothing else, swing because there’s a lot of green out there, kid;
Swing because there’s a whole lot of green.

When there was a sweet-potato moon
To mark the passing of July,
And I remember stars,
And kings,
And lights beneath the trees.

I have shut summer out.
The window is my barrier,
And it imprisons the sunlight.

I did not expect the end to be so quiet.

In festivals at twilight
New birds crow like kings

A train whistle sounds
Across twenty-five miles of starlit planet -
Where are you?

All the tinder in the world
Would not burn like this will.

Old bones under the hill
Sing quietly to the patient sunshine,
And sometimes that song is mine.

The silence screams in agony
As one last light goes out.

But believe that a hero lay here once.
They crowned him in the summer,
And he lived forever.

The sunrise is scarlet;
He comes from the south.

And now –
I look in the mirror and see
Only myself.

Because there are worse things
Than going in a flare of gold;
And the sky may never be so blue again.

I will not forget the faithless nights, whose ghosts belong to me.

And still a thought, a poet’s grief, burns on until the end
One day, my fellow soldier, may we meet again as friends.

Paint it white like your parents did
And hope that things will be different
Because you were here.

Their crew was dashed to pieces and was lost upon the sea.

Who will be left then
To call them back home?

Until the oceans rise up in the world
And Heaven falls
To ashes.

The deep, deep earth is eerie with secrets.

And I can’t remember
If it was twenty years past
Or five
Or perhaps less
But when was it
That I passed into old age?

This is the landscape of ten past three in the morning,
And the house has been quiet for a long time.

We do not regret the sunlight,
When we can get it;
We spend too much time in dark places,
Where the sun doesn’t dare stray.

Start on the edge of the fathomless sea
And make a break for the horizon.

She has not yet spoken
And said that she no longer loves me;
But this is only because
She will never speak to me again.

Space is silent and final,
The way the end will be -
Our omega,
Our complete reversal.

If he does not remember me,
Remind him every day.

With empty skies – selfish skies – all the way to the horizon.

I can change,
But not enough to save the world.

The sun is shattered, bold and dying
Starlight, like candlelight
Holding back the crushing dark.

But you knew before I did, little brother:
We can only go on.

She stands as still as sunlight,
Thinking that she was first.

Death makes saints of us all.

Huge and bright and empty,
Sunlight in an empty house.

But I can’t see Heaven yet,
And it’s a long way home from here.

This was before the power of our voices
Was crushed by the centuries.

Where has the world gone?
I turned my back for a second…