A formation
Of pilings
Long past utility
Though still
They throw
A striking pose
Just before
The curtain
Falls
But the years of consciousness
I could count
In just an afternoon
And my own years
Rattled off in seconds
In the vast pre-history
Of consciousness
This beauty unremarked
But do my remarks
Or those of others
Make the beauty so?
And the creatures
Which skittered there
Having barely left the sea
I think of a wave
And the littlest living things
Awash in the foaming ocean
Not so unlike
The littlest living things
Swishing over my feet in the surf
Many days
When I had nowhere to go
And all day to get there
Now I seem to be
Everywhere at once
But nowhere at all
All the time
Near enough
And still enough
To experience
The arc of the ocean
An eddy of time
Reflected
In the eddies
Of the sea
But my heart
Remains strong
My spirit
Undiminished
So I
Unrelenting
Resist time
Live today
Work toward
Tomorrow
One score and five thousand years ago
Human eyes came to see
Human hands learned to make
All our grandiose change
No match for nature’s hand
