"Wouldn't Time Be Out to Charm You...?"

[psalm_onethirtyone]

I heard the train
like a phonecall from God
a telegraph whirling through the wires along a sinuous path
through leafless trees by a dark river
past tall rock ridges and under the blind volcanoes
of the white moon
telling me how nothing on earth is ever lost
even when it slips out of a ship at sea
and sinks a mile down, the property of dust-fine zoorganisms
and silent fishes,
even when you bury its bones in your backyard
and then move house three times over.

At eleven o’clock p.m. the train went by, hollowly shouting
into the very black nighttime
about the truth of the earth, particles of text
burning to make its engine run, spinning into the chimney
along with coals and sparks and smoke.

Nothing is ever lost, even when it is never found.
Even the shreds of memories that make you a person
which drift away into star-sugared space
as you get older
still exist somewhere, in the causal butterfly of all futures
even when you are just a little old person
sleeping and dying
in a flower-print-wallpapered nursing home
bounded by tired nurses and sixty others of your kind.

I used to be afraid that we were taking over,
that people would erase the old blueprints
earth used to use to make herself--
but I was wrong.
Her memory is too good for that;
it holds everything,
from the first year when we were only bubbles of bacteria and plasma
to the bird-lizards that flew with feathered wings and jewelled scales
through dinosaur skies
to the spilled bags of scrabble tiles
that make up our cities.
The train was as clear as the fiery cold
of mountainside streams.
We are not the custodians of the earth.
We are just the pocketwatch with which she keeps the time.

Comments

[erinpuff]

I've been reading your poems for like a million years, and each one always just amazes me. <3 I love you.

[rainbowjehan.livejournal.com]

And I always feel tingly and bashful when you leave comments like this. <3 thank you.

[reconditarmonia.livejournal.com]

♥ ♥

[rainbowjehan.livejournal.com]

♥!

[little-lady-d.livejournal.com]

ah, this lovely, and more than lovely, it feels like it's saying a spiritual truth to me -- and i want to babble back about it, but i also want to be silent, respectful -- and i think i'll say, at least, that i love the final image that could be the pocketwatch of a conductor at eleven o' clock as much as the world's, and isn't that the message, that everything connects and nothing is lost?

[rainbowjehan.livejournal.com]

Thank you for that. Very, very much.

[little-lady-d.livejournal.com]

thank you. ^_^

[rainbowjehan.livejournal.com]

♥

[raanve]

Soujin, how do you do this? It is astounding. Thank you so, so much for sharing them with us.

[rainbowjehan.livejournal.com]

*bibbles at*

[softerthansound.livejournal.com]

We are not the custodians of the earth.
We are just the pocketwatch with which she keeps the time.

The futility of trying to express how much and how deeply this means, so full of despair and hope and promise, is only a whisper of the wonder of the poem itself.

[rainbowjehan.livejournal.com]

This poem, I have to be honest, was inspired by Greg Bear's The Forge of God, and the poem was almost titled that in homage. The first two-thirds of the book are standard apocalyptic science-fiction and kind of boring actually, but the final third is this beautiful rendering of the reactions of people in the last days, the changes in the earth, and the thoughts of those who accept death, don't, will be spared, &c. It is deeply tragic and kind of amazing.