(From an experience a friend of mine had many years ago. – Owen)
She sees the woods on fire all around,
She’s driving fast and running from the flame;
The forest is consumed in utter madness,
And if she is not quick, she’ll be the same
It’s both sides of the road, but she’ll keep fleeing
The swarming hatred of the burning hive —
She sees the woods on fire all around her,
But she’ll outrun it yet,
And she’ll
Survive
Here is the end of all of this:
most of us, one day,
will lie in a room where the shadows grow,
with memories crowded out by pain,
knowing, only then,
why we lit so many fires…
Just to keep these very shadows at bay.
Days we spend as interlocking cubes,
silver and shiny, neat and trim,
lost in the patterns of our illusions,
pushing chaos beneath the surface;
but look — down a hall you’ve already walked,
there’s a bed and pillow you’re going to use…
And you’ll be joined to all the people who used it before
I know the names
Of my patrilineal line
All the way back to 1650
My father
His father
His father’s father
And so forth
But while I have their DNA
Or genetic structure
Or blood
Or whatever today’s science says I have of theirs
To me, now, they’re mostly just
Symbols
Letters on a page
Runes from a bygone past
Except for my father who I knew
And my grandfather, who I’ve heard stories about
The rest?
While, in some ways, those are me
And my brother and my sister
Many are the ancestors that make up a person’s past
Too many to keep track of through time’s annals
Chances are, we’ve all been kings and queens
We’ve all been slaves and downtrodden
We’ve all lived in peace
And we’ve all died in war
But we may not see it
Because we cannot read
The symbols
Vapor, shadows
All we are
There but for
A fleeting second
Reach for something
Near or far
Saw you, when
The fingers beckoned?
Shadows, vapor
Naught but air
All our dreams
Sights through a portal
Ardent yearning
Lives to share
Sadly distant
Broken
Mortal
She felt joy
In daylight tulips
Beyond reach
Seen through a window
From a bed
She would never leave
Known to few
As years receded
Fading fire
Flowers that shone, like
Other days
And graceful moments
So sang the meadow
A mom in shadow
The days that we would run the dunes
Until the sun sank low;
Those timeless, breathless afternoons
So free of care and woe
The nights beside the ocean as
The stars came out to shine;
No other spot in mem’ry has
A feel so anodyne
As just to know, now that your gone,
That we were e’er so blessed:
And that, we’ll run again, someday,
Sweet dunes
Where we’ll find
Rest
Ultimate rebirth –
The death of
Our desire, in fire
Remember –
From ashes we came
All of us
the empty silence swallows us
when we tune out the noise;
the politics of hatred in
a world of equipoise –
the hollowness of everything,
the shadows in our eyes —
the camera that shows the soul
behind all our disguise —
we give in to the hatred, and
the calumny, the violence:
but come to reckoning at last
within the empty silence.
the empty silence swallows us
and chokes our last confession:
we saviors who would fix the earth,
but die within
depression
