Which Way, & for How Long ?
Weird life.
All that time, that rolls Before and around me like an irregular sea. A pulse of the world s breath beats like a hill; Miles of time To move in the mind of the tortoise, Spacious years For living and dying The day-dance of may-flies over the water. I have borrowed the slow heart-beat That shortens the day And swallowed time in a step too vast To heed the scurry of rabbit-paths in the thickets. I have ticked an hour into more aeons of time Than can be counted or conceived by men Stripped of empathy and Armed with stones. The ant burns away a long life, And the tree, In the onward rush of seasons. Trees grow no taller than I; They watch my life as I would watch an ant. My day is a second in time Their day is eternity To a may-fly. So what of my strange metabolism Flung between the particle and the cosmos? To what end my journeys, lonely as love, To the last forts of reason? Which way, Through lands of a million clocks that tell no more Than a dandelion puffed away in the wind? |