Sport 23: Spring 1999
Alan Riach — Going Away Poem for Chris Larsen
Alan Riach
Going Away Poem for Chris Larsen
the river takes its little tributary
in and runs away downstream
the trees create green cool, and
click: a photograph, two
men with their suggestions of
two smiles. It is as if the air has
suddenly cleared of smoke. Old soldiers
in the big house up the hill recuperate, they
fade back into colours, original tints,
bullet holes are mended in a sequence of unendingly
precise late afternoons. It is the one fine day
f summer. The laughter of my playful sons
is playing in my mind, a world away.
—You and I remember good and bad
times, colours, fevers of belief, and hesitations,
and mistakes.
Let this stand for other things.