The Change by Nancy O. Greene
This is never all there is. When the light
fades with the sunset, when the water
slows its course and becomes ice that
doesn’t satisfy our thirst, when the leaves
turn their shades and plummet to a bitter turf . . .
In seeing one it’s easy to forget the other,
the impermanent state of our existence—whatever it is—
those days so long becoming brief in their complexity,
our own cravings that stretch out for years, like separate
rivers carousing to the same ocean . . .
The elders say our language is departing,
transforming into dust carried by the sorrows
of ancestral failings, and tall angular shadows
move to consume what we once called beauty,
now called waste.
Still, they remind us of the story of the trees,
how they begin as most things do—fragile,
vulnerable, yet resilient against the storms
that assault them on their long ascension
from the earth to the sky.
And so our own expedition has not ended,
even though we grow weary, our cloaks and our
shields worn from countless battles. It can not end
here, to come so far only to find the same places
we left long ago . . .
