Fifteen Years

We’re the last…
Give it another fifteen years…
There’ll be nothing left…

Everything changes
Or nothing.

Day by day
Our cells change,
Our molecules and skin,
While a face in the mirror stares back,
Not completely unknown.

And there’s change
In the dirt beneath the stone,
In the wet grass as rain falls
And the dry ground drinks.

Change...

And the river, hill to sea,
Cutting deeper;
And the sky, blue to cloudy,
Before coming storm or clearing,
Shades through dusk or dawn;
And the trees’ cracked timber
Once growing, creaking, shatters;
And the shifting ground itself,
The earth’s crust and its continents
Floating stone on stone,
Rock on bedrock;
And the sea’s rising
Over all the murky secrets of the deep
With our long-dead flesh
Lying black-rotten among them.

We were always the last…
Human lives too short to register…
Another fifteen years or fifteen million…
What part of nothing do we understand?

© BH 2015

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Walking past the fence behind a local school, I overheard a conversation between two older men. The words of the man inside the fence, a groundsman, maybe, gave me the first three lines.

I suppose he was bemoaning the uncertain times we live in, how the old ways keep going the way of all old ways.

It made me think about how things swept away in an individual's lifetime are trifles compared with things we collectively sweep away: our personal sense of loss compared with what is lost through social change. 

Then there’s a greater devastation we seem powerless to hold in check as we take for today what we will never give back tomorrow. Deeper still than that uncomfortable truth is the one we gallows humourists take some solace in: the change we bring about might only be our own undoing. Time goes on, whose unseen changes turn mountains to rubble and ocean beds to mountain tops. 

We are of little moment. We know nothing about nothing.