Still, we must move downriver. We are
Each, in the end, prepared to turn to pure
Terror at the raging lip of time.
How can we vanish, yet live on in the past?

Life only seems to flow towards darkness:
Open those seams, and you see only light.
Red in the west heralds motion's darkness,
Revealing glories millennia past.
As the Earth spins, so we spin through time;
In gravity's grip, no circle is pure,
No being is Being, yet by being we are
Eternal, forever an instant of light.

Given: that light can only be; that light,
As such, cannot not be; that in time lights are,
But then are not; that nonetheless they are pure
Rays racing far beyond the lips of time,
Infinite, irrevocable; that the past
Exists forever, as such; that darkness
Limits only one's perception of light.

Most experts claim the night is clothed in darkness;
Instinctively, they view the past as past.
Do not assume that what you see in time
Is what appears in visions cold and pure.

Eternal isn't only forever. We are
Living eternally now, fragments of pure
Light--the track, the train, the farmhouse time
Erased. No thing is ever nothing--not the past,
Not loved ones lost, not what we know as darkness.

Copyright by Nicholas Gordon