Yet Untitled 141 - 'Things Ending, Things Not Yet Begun'

A poem about a recent visit to my hometown

Mar 30, 2025

Dearest Yet Untitler,

How’re you doing? It’s so nice to see reach out to you each week. Even nicer when I hear back! Remember to drop me a line if this instalment resonates (even if it doesn’t!)

Anyway, remember this song by The Boss?

I just made a quick trip to my stomping grounds. My hometown has underdone soooo many changes. Parts of it are unrecognisable. Parts of it are too familiar for comfort. When I see them, I’m hit with a flood of feelings and sensations from another time, another life. Lives! I’m simultaneously reminded of multiple people I used to be, some whose skin I haven’t occupied for a very long time.

I became aware of this while driving down a street that’s been built over multiple times. I was equally affected by looking for familiar structures and not finding them as I was by the effect of seeing something I recognised that still sood, unscathed by time.

Subtle, loaded feelings overlapping with each other. Nothing very profound, but palpable. Why leave them lying locked inside my head? I’m curious about what they may trigger inside yours!

Here goes:

Things Ending, Things Not Yet Begun

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

I never knew that tree to be so ample
With its shade 
Have I travelled before on this new road that 
They've made?
God know how many trees - so many branches,
Roots and leaves 
Were removed to make way for this madness 
Floating in the breeze. 

There stands that house whose rooms 
I have known 
Do the people who lived there still 
Call it a home?
It now has two new neighbours: one to its left,
The other to the right.
One’s a glass monster, the other: 
A ghost in white. 

There’s another house down another lane 
That’s no longer there 
Bricks and mortar gone, its walls are 
No more. It's nowhere. 
Inside: two boys with sea green eyes; they and I
Used to play Ice Pice
Gone to America - their green eyed mother, their board games 
With their spinners and dice.

There’s an open field across town where some 
Crops used to stand. 
How those wedding halls popped up overnight, 
I’ll never understand.
There’s the spot where some kids once shamed me 
For being rich and fat.
A young donkey colt gambols, distracting momentarily
A foraging rat.

Mother stands in the same place where 
Grandmother stood
Unswallowed medicines have changed colour inside
Very stationary boxes of wood.
A letter just begun, thick brown fluid coagulating
In a forgotten bottle of rum
The lamp with swirls for legs sends up circular shadows, 
Outside, the last rays of the setting sun.

This theatre of time is much like a dance 
Of moving light. 
This passage of time fills my senses: my taste, smell,
My sound and sight.
No way to stop it, so best to just let it run:
The momentary dark of things ending 
Lit by the light of things not yet begun.