Story's End

Photo by Ron Walker

I guess every story has an ending,

every person, every grain of sand.

I tend not to think about it
though I've had a few of them...

Inside every rock are infinite particles

settling into cliffs and oceans,

statues built to Rome and war,

Caesar this, Caesar that,

whilst the coloseum roars with

triumphant glory!

Somebody died today,

sound the gong:

perhaps this time it is Mother Earth.

How long will she be here to guide us,

she who is so vulnerable?

Why do we always forget her
in our business equations?

We'd die without her comforts

her warmth, her spring showers,

her wonderful foodstuffs,

Her shapeshifting winters,

her tremors and floods,

her carcinogenic viruses...

I guess we all have to die someday.

But I wouldn't be caught dead

in deep space or the solar wind,

I'd tumble unencumbered and preserved

or be heated up like water,

effervescent, then boiling.

It's a joke how we take

our mothers for granted.

None are perfect although

we want to be the One.

Just wait another ten or twenty years

until the first injury comes
and you're figuring it out on the run

or in terrible denial,

whatever is best for the kid,

bear it all or

dump it!

I did both

through foolishness

and acute gullibility.

I hope you will forgive me:

There was a third way.

And now as I honor my own mothers,

All seven generations of them,

I can't even imagine

life without technology!

The world must have been a

hard and lonely place

without human networking.

I remember a lot of good these days

and I'm forgetting the bad.

Why hold on to it? 

I let it glide into space

to evaporate with the best of them.

There are just so many years

left to become graceful

before the story's end.

Dance and make love.

Write a poem.

Paint a landscape.

Capture earth's beauty.

Then sleep and dream it again.

That's all I can do

and it's usually enough

to keep me interested.