THE END OF TIME
(written in Santa Cruz, Bolivia)
"So dawn goes down to day." --Robert Frost
Strange to be here at the end of time
What the ancients thought incredibly distant
Yet here we are, where we have always been
At the very end of all of time itself.
The next moment's step into the unknown
Is always based on the hopeful prediction
That the future moment will resemble the past
That the transition between the two will be gentle.
At some point the weight of past instants
Becomes more precious than those to come
That realization is always slow to settle
Yet I find myself adrift in what does not exist.
A lost world with tentacles embedded in my brain
Where my dying father just wanting to be fed ice
Where my baby son was born hardly crying
What light can be let in through closed eyes?
Though even time itself must begin and end
Does it move somehow through us
Or do we ourselves move through time
Leaving a trail of memories we can't erase?
In my lifetime the end has often been predicted
The whole thing supposedly crashing down
Like a fire sweeping through a long-deserted city
Or the slow freezing of a lake from top to bottom.
The ice of the last days of my father
Ice left by the sun itself dying cold
In some future landscape of white
Where even memories of time are no more.
[©2016 STEVEN W. BAKER]
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