Peace

I have found peace in many places,
Harvesting rice, before sitting down to eat last seasons.
Swapping choices cuts with friends,
Passing a glass of strong moonshine.
Because beer seems bottled and extravagant.

Or different times, living in Muslim communities,
Where alcohol is frowned upon.
So you eat chicken in peanut sauce,
Swap stories and jokes in languages barely understood.
Watching the red dawn over adobe huts.

Or laying the last brick in house I once built.
Before giving it away because I became restless.
But the sun set over mountains there.
Which have always seemed permanent.
And by consequence superior.

Or lying in naked arms,
Thinking of children and families.
In that moment after orgasm,
When the world shrinks to two.
With slow Saturdays, tea, crumpets and dreams.

Watching a snake move with unsurpassed elegance
Through a mulberry tree.
A river flowing never slightly in the distance.
Jungle mountains whom really know their trees
I wonder if they know me – their voyeur.

Riding an endless mountain road.
Through clouds and storms.
Cold and hot, the potholed tarmac
Stretching into an unknown distance.
With cities and sugary fruit shakes.

Holding hands on a town bench.
Sometime passed closing time.
With a shared brown papered bottled.
With jokes about the world
And the Monday to come.

So now it is skyscrapers and crowded streets
Where I find peace.
In a swirling mass of impersonal humanity.
But somehow this makes sense, the unknown passenger
next to me, bumping into me with the rock of the train.

Lost in their own thoughts, their own world now.