Time sweeps by in decades like a line of thunderstorms, and suddenly, we are decades older and can't remember how we got here. How did we get to be so old? Why do we still feel so young? Why do we still know so little?
Every age has its compensations, its own benefits, its own points of light. One of our tasks as we go through life is to notice and appreciate these as we go along.
Another reason to pay attention.
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Nomads
They began chanting with both feet,
Wandering lands, marking by song
Where they had been. That became theirs
Wherever they could not stay,
Because nobody owned the earth
Until buried beneath it. Maps
Never were fixed whose signs changed
Even when feet stayed the same.
They knew each other by different names
And traded things for other things,
Until they decided to gather
And make a book that recorded
Their songs -- such was this news
For certainty, forcing malleable
Ink stains to solidify, strokes
Holding nature to immutability.
Then they closed the book. They said,
“Nothing more may now be added;
There is already enough that we do not
Understand.” So began footnotes, parsing
Whose place in a sentence could alter
Monks becoming scribes becoming scholars,
Folding into leaves of the sacred
Their lives and interpretations of life.
The book that was in one tongue
Was transformed into another
And sounds once again were freed
To mean whatever was needed.
By now each had lost the knack
Of remembering without a book,
So when the book in their hands
Burned in the desert, they were lost.
[Disposable Poem June 28, 2010]
Dr. Mike
Dr. M:
What a great poem. Thanks, sir.
H. K.
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