I remember the great steamships coming
close against the shore, ruddy-fleshed oarsman,
red faced, weatherworn with sea salt air.
Each tortured grin against the out-going tide,
a stultified, sanctimonious
struggle against the buffeting surf.
Awaiting the advantage of foam topped
breakers rushing in hard against the swell.
As the trailing wind of memory advises
and informs, we are but the
devastated landscapes of the soul,
laid waste again, a myriad-fold by times
crushing thrall, taking all before in an
unstoppable tsunami of passing tears
each moment a photon of light in the
tumult of the ages of passing years.
I remember the golden Queen, seated
and scented with perfumes rare, amidst a
harem of dusky boys, ostrich feathers
cooling the heat of the afternoon air,
a journey that changed the world.
An empire ruined, a dynasty lost,
and no reprieve for the queen once beloved.
A loss not mourned in the general rout.
And the dull ache of memory is a
frozen snap-shot of having been, a sum
of all that’s passed of what we recall.
The past written in stone, a
fetid and crumbling foundation of a fate revealed
as the moments unfurl to tell their tale.
The second that’s ours, the here and the now,
the past that’s gone and will never return.
I remember the mud and the bloody
carnage of destruction; stretching back
through ages past, the story re-wound and
played out again and again in a
tedious argument of insidious intent.
And as each soul bewails it’s own story
from dirt-besmirched eyes, Mothers wail for sons,
girls for lovers lost in the mouths of years.
And so it is and so it’s always been
as we hover on this sharpened point of
infinitesimal space with what has been,
stretching out behind and the past laid out
in a patchwork of lies, history retold
re-written by the winning side.
...And the trailing wind of memory
advises and informs, we are but the
sum of of all that’s past and is yet to be.