Away From Home Poem by Roger elkin

Away From Home

One thousand miles we drove to find a sky like this:
bluer than our tent, big by day, and without cloud to all horizons:
and by night, bigger still, but black, sequinned with far stars,
graced by moons.

In such open Paradise as this where space is ours,
the ground parched, but firm, beneath our feet,
and trees weary with dust, we celebrate our half-willed exile.

Lawrence would have envied us these lizards, pre-history’s residual toys,
and from the picture-postcard-pool we can’t send home
Hockney drawn a bigger splash.

Three weeks on, we find the openness confines.

By day, the mad-dog heat is overmuch;
we fear the mighty trousered bees deflowering tight petunias,
and since we’ve learned some will bite, we skirmish lizards.
Lost in its own reflection even the pool is paling;
our talk half-baked as skins, we squat, soapstone Buddhas
at its rim, squint against the sun and search each other’s eyes
for memories of cloud.

Or by night, drawn moth-like round our lamp
listening to the cicadas tzinging through the dark,
we yen for late summer rain in hedgerows,
the press of wet grass underfoot, the nettles’ must.

It is at times like these we begin to comprehend
the hurt in Bartok’s haunted eyes, his music’s pain.