Yesterday’s Now

Yesterday
there was a different kind of thought

Now

The flame is heavy upon itself
flowering heat upon its valley
where ashes serve starving roots
beneath repeated waves of man's molten rock

Once

The pounding rain knew not
its echo deep beneath virgin earth
where sparklets of tinctured growth
drank sparingly
ever thankful of
consumptions' gray ash
and granite's breathing fissures

Once was thought

Tomorrow's needs
no longer demand notice
of harvest's color
or banquet's abundance

Man’s pomposity arose

Thinking that power to live
relies not on that grown
from dampness of tears
merged gently with compost of time

Narcissism embraced digital dependence

Future's harvest
insisted only on
mind's inverted
ones and zeros
miniature of miniatures
Nanobots engineering
infinity's powers of ten

Consciousness spoke

What say this called geology
biology
organic history?

Why touch so honored
hearing so revered
fragrance so cherished
taste so rewarding
seeing so essential?

Deaf ears prevailed

Tomorrows remembered

Might know of what once was
but will they ever experience
what might have been
had rain kept falling
to remedy the flame
to birth the ashen dust
to grow Nature’s beginnings
and perpetual ends?

Singularity

Once merely near
now beneath rainless clouds
shrouding  fire without flame

Time ponders without sleep
our to-be-born future.