Nuzzled towards the warmth of sun,
Wrapped in pelts to blunt
The numbing chill of night,
Divisions born of such routines,
Hot and cold,
To spark the soul,
To tease the primitive mind.

The light to act as bounty’s guide,
The chance to watch the beasts
That roam the fertile country side.
The opportunity to feast
Where fellow creatures congregate,
Where they stop to sleep,
Where they pause to dine.

Sunshine, a gift, to see, to live,
Survival instilled in supple genes,
Unaware the true significance.
The night to hide from hungry fangs.
With dawn and fire,
Comes illumination
And deliverance.

Old eyes to watch the shadows fall,
The passage nearly drawn the same,
All dying to make sense of it.
To mark the footsteps of the stars,
Here and gone,
Round and round,
Like the gods
Dancing in the dark wind.

Feast of spring and summer drought,
Stores in autumn for the frosty
Famine of cruel winter’s breath.
You know you had to live that long
If ever to make sense of it.
Sense of it,
Who will ever make sense of it?

To count the mouths that must be fed,
Lines tally the take of fruit, of fish,
The game, it takes to feed.
Will there ever be enough? This,
The simple truth,
And this, the birth
Of mathematics.

The elders turn to tell the young,
Be watchful of the budding plants,
The cycle of all growing things.
The migratory pathways,
What flies away,
Comes back again.
What disappears,
Appears reborn

And then…

The moon to hint of promised change,
More and more to be revealed,
While more and more remains the same.
If older would be wiser, thinking,
Ah, to catch these precious moments!
Ah, to hold these
Marvelous mortal days!

And so the numbers one through ten,
Taking stock becomes the way,
A brave new world at tapping fingertips.
Where zero meant the kiss of death,
And adding on made perfect sense.

From there a system was created, it made
Continuity out of randomness,
Consistency out of change.
The idea that humans could assume control,
The idea that humans could really take control,
And so, this thing
Called Time began.
Time began to be called upon
Called upon by name.

Intertwined with faith and expectation,
The chance to do it all,
The chance that we could do it right.
And so the sands in glass became the hours.
The hands began their sweeping.
Now count the twenty-four,
Where once was day and night.

Alas, spontaneity has lost its lofty pitch
And thinking on the fly
Has become an attribute of prehistoric minds.
We, the victims of cyclic circumstance,
Now the prisoners
Of this, our borrowed Time.

Settled into our tenuous schedules,
We obsess over every minute,
Every second of every single day.
We have lost our ties to God and reason,
And watch helplessly, hopelessly,
As the seasons slowly slip away.

By this distraction,
This curse of Time,
This giving up of our own true identity,
We have relinquished our ties to light and life,
We have abandoned Eden.
We have forsaken the dream
Completely.





Michael S. True
11-19-13