Poem To My Future Self
Dust – look at what you have achieved.
You are the stuff of stars
Yet you are so dull and shiftless.
You who were the ecstasy of worms
Are now all wind and dirt.
Where are your dreams?
Dust – why so useless?
Do you not crave action?
Are you content to drift
In aimless ripples?
Are you now so purposeless?
What are you planning?
Dust – you were once me.
You sought to live
And now you skulk in corners
And cover beauty
In your carelessness.
Do you not care?
I hear you.
I am dust, vapour and gas –
I did not amount to much.
I will touch stars again
But until then
I will exist
In what used to be, what is, and what I will become.
Opher 14.12.2015
Poem To My Future Self
I am told that I may not always be the same as I am today.
A thousand years from now I may appear different to how I presently am.
I have this on good authority but I do not really believe it. This body I possess may have changed. The evidence of the mirror backs up the possibility that I am not the same as I was. The evidence of my experience shows that others before me have disappeared. But inside my head it is the same me peering out. I can’t imagine he will want to leave this green jewel shrouded in mystery. I do not believe I will intrinsically change.
Yet seeing myself and others age and die certainly puts things in perspective.
I’ve had a life. My dust, this walking patch of dirt, has thoughts, dreams, wishes and still strives to change the world.
What are my visions for the future? What is this consciousness I possess?
What is this body, this corporal entity, this substance that I call me? It is transient, ethereal and lifeless. It is dust – dust, wind and water.
Already I have shed a million bodies. My past dust drifts behind me like a gossamer shroud. I do not mourn those particles that were me. Already each gulp of air teems with molecules that were once part of me and may be again. The water comes and goes to rest a while in clouds before once again flowing through my tap, blood and kidneys.
All those zillions of atoms are not me. They never knew they were ever part of me.
Or did they?
Do I imbue them with my energy? Do they, like me, dream?
They will swirl and eddy around his planet forever, until our sun finally expands to incorporate them once more to its fiery breast and they return to whence they came.
Perhaps they will always throb with the essence of me? For one day I am destined to be a star again.
Opher's World 