Life is not travelling like a leaf,
he said, upon the flow of time
more like a sluice-gate,
or a fish-net anchored on the river bed
the open trawl of consciousness
through which a stream of happenings
flows from the future, on into our past.
All time runs backward.
Things start from Armageddon,
travel down the dwindling generations
trickle to an end in Eden.
Now is where we are
and where we always will be
till the current has eroded us away.
To redeem the time, you must buy back
experience that could otherwise be lost;
it is the fabric of our lives.
We are what we have been.
Our aim is not refinement of the soul
for future glory, rather
the fashioning of a past to come.
Such is the lure of the historian
of sects who sanctify the ancestors
the genius of an artist who can use
his fractured childhood to spin gold.
Work with what past still lies
ahead of you, shaping a better history
to live with in the days to come.
.
Tony Lucas
.