A Poem

The Eclipse at Crowgate Hill

The road vanished long ago.
Time here doesn't pass,
it unravels.

I followed the birds,
thinking they might remember
where home was,
but they only circled
and screamed.

A gate stands open
but I don't remember
coming through it.
Was I meant to leave
or meant to arrive?

The fence has fallen—
wire slack,
duty long abandoned.
The trees lean away from me,
their branches like warning hands.

The sun hangs wrong in the sky,
a smudge of fire
pressed through ash.

Everything looks
like something I once knew.
A fence.
A hill.
A silence so thick
it feels like breathing dust.

I think I’ve lost more than direction.
Names slip.
Faces blur.
Even my own shadow
has stopped trying to follow.

In the stillness,
something waits—
a fragment of warmth,
a sound I almost know,
humming in the dark like memory.

You once said hope
was a steady light,
but I’ve learned
it flickers
like a match in a storm—
sometimes lost,
sometimes hiding,
never quite gone.

If I keep walking,
maybe I’ll find it.
Or maybe I’ll become it—
the thing that stays behind,
after a voice stops singing,
as the birds rise
into a sky that no longer cares
if I was ever here.

(This poem was inspired by an image called "July 11th, 1991, in Chiapas, Mexico" // Photo by Antonio Turok)