The Ghent Review Volume1, Number 1, summer 2016 | Page 27

See what?
Old man:
That face, peering out of the hedge
The way a bird might peer out from its nest.
Young man:
I saw nothing.
Old man:
But you must have seen it
That face, that face of tragic beauty
Which I have seen in this place before
A face that has drawn me back to this place
After twenty years of travelling.
Young man:
I saw nothing but the shakage of leaves
In a shuddering wind.
Old man:
No, it was there, as if it was waiting for me
As if it has waited for me all these years
That I might at last resolve its meaning
And die without a question in my mind.
Young man:
You’re blathering under the force of the moon
The way you often do. You mutter in your dreams
When you think I do not hear – but I hear.
You are doing no more than that now.
Old man:
No, it was more than that
It was some apparition from between the worlds
Of life and death – some half and half that cannot live
As we do in the world we live in
Young man:
A trick of the moon, no more, that’s all,