A symphony of ifs
Life is short.
A few sunrises and sunsets,
then the eternal night
as if you had never been here.
A mere memory here and there,
for a few more days.
Few sunrises, few sunsets.
They say war is okay if the cause is just,
if the army is moral,
“the most moral army in the world.”
What would Jesus say?
The “other cheek” theory…
Hitler, Genghis, Napoleon, Columbus, Alexander
they beat Jesus every day, any day, all day.
I wish to be old,
my skin like a dry raisin,
walking slowly,
carrying my years
toward the sunset.
I sunrised long ago
too long before you were born.
I’m the last human being,
born in a human world
with bad and good,
with people,
when humanity was something
bad enough and good enough.
I’ve travelled into the past,
the wave of death advancing inexorably.
Reality born from the ghosts of what was.
I lift the veil,
travelled under.
I’ve seen it all.
They are still there,
entangled in place:
the sun of the past.
Jesus is still on the cross,
waiting for the fourth hour.
The past holds us all
Achilles and Zeus,
Plato and Peter,
Goethe,
the soldier who died just yesterday,
our grandfathers when they were young,
Marie Antoinette with her head still on her shoulders,
JFK before the fatal turn,
Chernobyl still habitable,
Che with the cigar, smiling.
Fuck the world.
Hiroshima’s 100,000 people before the apocalypse,
Hitler preaching in the bars.
Our past is an ocean
that each moment passed adds a drop
of what was and will never be again.
Light dies in the past
but stays in memory
a castle, unchanging, made of awareness.
The past is forever.
Whereas the future…
Which cell of your body enters first into the new year?
Which hair is pulled first by the future?
God is transforming right now
what you were into what you will be.
You can do nothing about it.
You might drag yourself over this bridge
instead of the other.
You change the course of the universe
like a pebble thrown in water.
Imagine you could see it all
past, present, future,
everywhere,
like God.
All would be a memory of itself.
You would look at your world in awe.
Imagine all the Einsteins and Napoleons of the future,
all wars and all peace,
all the children of today old men tomorrow,
then bones and ashes,
again and again the grass of spring coming back to life every year.
Never died. Always there.
Creation from creation.
An uninterrupted chain of the past.
Like us born from the past of our parents,
two lights merging into one candle.
All the Einsteins, all the Beethovens,
all the past
like a wave
covering
pain.
An ocean of pain and light,
a symphony of ifs.