Adieu, Free-born and Open Diary Thursday, February 06, 2014
Good bye, my sweet friend. You are a cyber web site but to so many of us you have been a home, an escape, and in some ways, a life all in itself. It is only fitting that you go out with the very poem of which you are its namesake. "A Welcome World" was your first real entry and this will be your last here.
Free-Born
(a eulogy to my first horse, Ginger the day she died)
Another pilgrim has returned!
I stretch open my arms
And a silent welcome is extended.
But home I have not returned
But only to reminiscence
Of a life died on the wind.
I feel the marked ground
Beneath my bare feet.
I see the bars fallen,
Nevermore to be raised.
Through tear-blurred eyes,
I see the ghosts of two souls.
A child, wild and free
On a red mare on a sea of gold.
I close my eyes
And the world fades before a wall of black.
I feel the loving warmth beneath me
And I see the wind in my eyes.
I hear a soft drumming sound
And I smell the scent of parted grass.
We have become a streak of flame
In the twilight of a passed day.
The glory of being free and alone,
We are creatures like all the rest.
Far in a dusky sky,
A white egret sweeps above
And tips his wing in salute.
Now, we halt
And the wind whispers its death about us.
Like a mother shielding her child,
The world has turned her raw face away
To expose a flawless innocent face.
A waving blanket of tranquility,
This green-gold marsh of mine,
The home of the Free-born.
We are not mortal
But eternal spirits in a forever land.
Alas, my eyes open
And my land is empty.
No wind stirs
But still the grass heads bow in grief.
I kneel and whisper a soundless name.
My fingers feel the deep hoof imprints
But time will wear them away.
Now, I am barred from the freedom
Of the free-born.
I once went hand and hand
With the wind and the land.
I return never
But the spirits of red and gold
Will run forever.
Written September 16, 1966
Adieu, beloved friend
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