A continuance of time and place merge...

I return to my Tuscan days and found a poem I had left uncompleted. The sense of daily life as a repetition and the beauty one can find in the everyday chores inspired this work. I hold much respect for the Tuscan farmers and this writing is for them;

an ordinary day in Toscana

...sunlight silhouette
sets over Pienza. Embers
of the ordinary day,
cool terra-cotta crimson–
fall on these ordinary people.
It is January.
It will be dark soon.
The contadino works with hurried purpose
to complete diurnal chores;
manure is cleared from the stalls,
the pigs are fed,
the goats are milked,
dry wood is brought inside
for the long night ahead

There is a stillness to the landscape.
A return to the plain sense of order–
(or perhaps, only the sunlight playing tricks?)
The endless columns of vineyard
stripped of their leave-coated armor
slump stoic, like frozen troops
in their amazing, uniform march to nowhere.
The grain fields of spring
wait laconic and fallow.
Deciduous trees now bare,
a certain chill chides the air.
The mind of winter is the contadino’s,
who knows the season, as always...
Time for the land to repose,
to quench its thirst, catch its breathe.

Chimney smoke dissipates
in the waning din.
The little towns set on these hills
soon undistinguishable in the night.
Tomorrow will come,
the rooster will call
a simple ordinary repetition will begin anew...
a continuance of time and place merge
a player upon his stage.