Falling Knife
Why catch
A falling knife
When time moves
Under us
Around trees and suns
Through valleys
Over fields of conflicts
And understandings
Through tensions
And new loves
Through movements
And stillness
And the stars above
Through our things
And our songs
And our words
In the long river before us
And behind us
In the all too human
And beyond
When in the end
All our worries
Will be gone
Ordinary
Finding beauty
In the forgotten things
In the laughter of strangers
And loved ones alike
The same mountain
Against the same horizon
A lone bird at the window
The way the big clock
Chimes in the corner
And the TV plays to no one
In the background
Seeking solace
In the ordinary
And the mundane
And being who you are
In the moment
No explanation
No regrets
Awash
Life is meant to be felt
Not understood
Awash in direction
Without destination
Movement
Passing through
Without thought
Waves in a tidal pool
A passageway
To nowhere
And everywhere
Into the spaces
Between moments
Morning in the Bush
Dawn hits big
In Africa
Ancient
Watchful and alive
The light
Catching the tall grass
Turning the veld
To burnished gold
The bark of baboons
In the old tree
And the quiet of impala
In the morning mist
Elephants
Breaking branches
In the splintering darkness
And baobabs standing alone
Older than days
Giraffes grazing the timberline
In a strange
Lumbering silence
As the sun rises
In a restless remembering
With the road disappearing
Into a fresh heat
And nothing
Needing to explain itself
Unyielding
Like the stillness
Of old gold
Power
Without hurry
Like a shared instinct
Made visible
In the thunder
Of lions remembering
Like ancient kingdoms
Between heartbeats
Across the savanna
In the Meadow
The gone glory
Of forced living
Catching a ride
On a unicorn’s horn
Cotton tails dancing
Where the tiny flowers
Bloom
In the meadow
Above the valley
Beneath the tree line
Where we whispered
Goodbye
To our yesterdays
As the wind
Gathered its secrets
In the fading light
And hope took root
In the wild
John Drudge is a social worker working in the field of disability management and holds degrees in social work, rehabilitation services, and psychology. He is the author of eight books of poetry: “March” (2019), “The Seasons of Us” (2019), New Days (2020), Fragments (2021), A Long Walk (2023), A Curious Art (2024) and Sojourns (2024), and Too Close to the Shore (2025). His work has appeared widely in literary journals, magazines, and anthologies internationally. John is also a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee and lives in Caledon Ontario, Canada with his wife and two children.
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