Encounter with my dead father

I am holding my father’s hand so white

And in silence we walk up the whispering track.

Dark figures with helmets lie on the side.

Blue shapes of hands wave to me in the night

and I don’t dare to look back.

No purple blood runs from father’s bones,

no wound below his heart I can see,

but softly a cross rises up from the stones

for his soul that still lingers and moves and moans

in the breeze of eternity.

Oh the nearness of death, however far,

from a dark head fallen to a weeping child,

Since that year when the sky without a star

Had decayed into darkness, where still we are

In a world tha's abused and defiled.

Oh that quietness along the blue river’s bank,

When thoughts raise all those forgotten things

And like phantoms they move in silent rank,

Point to the sky and the earth, draw a blank

And open their filigree wings;

And rise into disappearing white mist

And leave me alone where I stand and remain,

In the midst of shadows that turn and twist

And grow and decline and cease to exist

When a bird calls strangely in vain.