View from the Veranda
By John Herlihy

I
Somewhere,
In a faraway place,
In a land called Indigo,
I found myself sitting contentedly,
Sitting contentedly on a spacious veranda,
With the whole world at my slippered feet,
Like an expectant host ready for idle dreams to greet,
With nothing much to say, only the mind at play.
What did I see but a view to the horizon.
A panorama that defied time with its sense of melodrama,
No people were around to make a sound,
If there were, I would still be earth-bound.
Nature sounds sparkle all around,
As such, I feel skyward-bound.
When listening, one could hear nature’s petals opening,
No rusty hinges there, only sound silent as in floating.
The buzzing of bees, the sawing of crickets,
Chipmunks run hurriedly across branches into thickets.
The little claws of squirrels sound like nuggets of laughter,
As they scurry up the drainpipe into the building’s rafters.

II
The view that morning stirred the imagination and the heart;
Beauty can do that; it can glue us together and pull us apart,
Lifting the soul to an unexpected awakening,
While the world stumbles day by day in moments of forsaking.
The palm groves extended in clusters seemingly forever,
Interspersed with beds of hearthland filled with heather.
The morning ducks entered the scene in a gaggle of commotion,
Filling the morning with quacking as they went about their devotions,
Rushing down to the nearby pond before jumping into the waters,
Then settling down into the marshland grass like shanty town squatters.
Smokestacks rose as silent sentinels in the calm of this nature park,
Sending calligraphic smoke rings whose message rode the tail of the wind,
Recalling the industry of humanity to leave its mark in this bucolic setting.
Thatched cottages speckled the scene with intimations of human life;
Indeed, a farm girl, fair and plump, escorted her cows into the meadow,
While young children spilled into the fields shining their light all aglow.
I had never visited this country before and I may never visit it again;
But this scene from the veranda of my room returns to me like a friend.
Ah yes, I forgot to mention the tamarind tree waving to me from the grove.
The sky itself evoked some lost memory in this glorious treasure trove.