Time augers deeply
Its worm-like whim astride
The face of meaning
Blinking wild and faring well
Over chain and bell alike
I think of you
Tethered like that
To your holy ghosts
Those wraiths that wrap your dreams
And fail the promises abandoned
So long ago, all those fine illusions
You love so well
Let go, let collapse
Envelop you
Your grasp contains nothing
But helplessness
Let go
People dying all around, it seems. Old friends, old enemies, sometimes in one and the same person. I, too, am in that queue somewhere. Prompting this senryu:
Time passes
And so, too,
All our asses
Can you leave a city
awash in dust and ashes
abandoned by memory and fate
by standing in its middle
and daring it
to fall around you?
Another sailor slips the pier
To the swift beyond
No waiting in this queue
Will call when your turn comes up
No use guessing
No use jumping the line
It’s crossed in all due time
How we push and pull
Unaware, apparently, that
No effort speeds or hinders
We play the waiting game
Doing our best to be useful
All the while missing the point
Looking in vain for our ship to come in
Across our own waning gunwales
The undiscovered Country, from whose bourn
No Traveler returns, Puzzles the will …
~ Shakespeare, Hamlet Act 3 Scene 1
These borders are flimsy
You wonder how they hold
You don’t see the other side
You don’t see past the mirror
Soiled with hope and love
You wonder how the place can hold
A history’s worth of grief
All the loved and despised
All the grand and homely
The celebrated and unnoticed
But mostly the long forgotten
The teeming ranks of lives gone by
Every one sworn to remembrance always
Blessed by sacraments
Or cursed into sullen graves
You may lunge at these borders
Or flinch or simply watch
But no one crosses from there
Though some claim to have gone and returned
These ghosts live only through you
Breathe only with your lungs
In a country still undiscovered
exiles child 