Tuesday, June 11, 2013

If not us...


What if geography overwhelmed
history? Left us with no story
to tell? It would begin
and begin and begin.

The end, if it came,
would be a long time coming
and look like we’d seen it all before.
We wouldn’t decisively know

what we’d seen and the words
for regret would sound little
and late, if we heard them at all.
When the glaciers came,

they’d press down hard,
grinding and gravelling
our stillborn lives and,
if we could see ourselves,

we’d be so much unambitious
dust. It would begin
and begin and begin,
and when the wind picked up

the dust, it would whisper
late summer’s turn to fall,
snow yet to come,
to bury all our undreamed dreams

in mounds where our endless
undanced dances
would begin and begin
and begin

a fruitless drift,
never to arrive at the foot
of the tower,
with the faint image

of god unremarked,
and nothing but ghosts passing by
in a place no one could name.

Never to get to where
history remembers who we are,
where hope is a gift
we must work harder to give.

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