Mindfulness and meditations on ‘Now’ inspired this poem:
P R E S E N C E
The moving finger of fact,
Field of focus,
The now of the piano key
As you hear the present melody,
The typewriter’s arm swinging in
To print this one word,
The calm eye of the storm
at the centre
Of an uprooted beyond,
Like me today
The day after I have been,
The day before a vacuum
Of nothingness,
Like my thought
That turns so quickly
Into a scattered memory,
My will moving like a torch
In the absolute night of my mind
Surrounded by fading peripheries,
Ephemeral
Like the winking city lights
Seen from a satellite
As Gaia turns,
As the present of this Universe
Begins to expire
Ere it arises
Into its impermanence.
The rocks have memorized
The ages, as too the trunk of a tree
And we, precipitate of the past,
Our childhood,
Or a sky of long past stars
Registered in the firmament,
And genetic material’s amazing tenacity
And permanence, packaged with memories
Of how we should be,
All the living world that we see,
Archives full of minutest histories.
Shall we speak of the seed then
In the past tense
Or is it in the present?
Is it our past then that has presence
and the present
But a pause
Between what we have been
And what we will be,
Propelled by cause
As the first moment
Of its effect, point of focus,
The past and the present
Just one presence
Igniting outwards to eternity ?