"Dare to care for things that are no longer there."

INDIANA, ONTARIO

Spectral streets up grassy knolls,

A graveyard overgrown with brush,

Living houses gone to stones,

Experiences gone to dust.

Dare to care

For things that are no longer there.

Read my poems in your voice,

Excite my senses with your tongue,

Think the thoughts as I did once,

Feel the weight that for me hung.

I pray I may

Live again with you some way.

~ Lawrence Miller

Indiana, Haldimand County, The Grand River

"Indiana, Ontario", Tower Poetry 53, no. 2 (Winter 2004 - 05)

~ Used with permission from Lawrence Miller. Author of Avro Arrow  A Picture History, Lorimer Publishing, 2011.

"It's a haunting place. . .So many people and so much going on there not very long ago, and now, nothing much;  just quiet, and that graveyard on the hill. . ."

"It was the year before they cleared the overgrowth from the cemetery;  one of the few times I was actually so moved by something that I_tried_to write down how it made me think.

"I even got thinking about what happens to_things_that people make, when both the people and the things are gone.  Hence, for the dozen or so people left on earth who may care about such stuff, the playing about with the "bob and wheel" rhyme format in the last two lines of both stanzas.  That's a technique that was hot stuff in the late medieval period and it, like the poems that used it, and the people who made them, is now pretty much forgotten." ~ L. Miller

For more on Indiana, please click on Label:  Heritage River.  Tomorrow:  Photos of the cemetery on the hill.