Coming Home [3] Poem by Gert Strydom

I am back after twenty years
and my childhood memories
are clear, but this place
is no longer as it had been.

Farm buildings are dilapidated,
the old farm house is now a ruin
with the pretty garden gone
and only a few tokens
that at a time people was living here.

The fields where maize used to grow
lie empty now, with no tractors tracking the land
only open veldt and a few thorn bushes are left

and I feel bereft, as if even the memories
are now dying, but the big oak trees
that I used to climb
are still where they used to be
and their shade is welcoming.