and the sweet cold pools of summer,
this equinox, this pivot point,
on which these seasons turn,
we stand.
Balanced here
upon the humus of a billion years,
the skeletons of diatoms and one celled shells
becoming (Oh! Becoming!)
many celled becoming trees reptiles mammals birds
these sturdy helices of fecund green and bloody red
that coil and uncoil across these millioned years
of endless cycling exhultations of oxygen and carbon,
sun-driven towards awareness and complexity,
unwilling and unknowing, we stand.
Here at this equinox, awakening.
As humans waken, so:
one sound penetrates and then
another and then
a ray of light creeps in to fire the optic nerve to day
and with it temptations dark lure beckoning,
to turn again to history's sleep
and our collective dreamtime's jumbled myriad myths
that once we lived in harmony with all
or ruled this creation unopposed!
Or stood alone so wise, so proud, so grand,
so beloved of Heaven.
Here at last, at equinox,
the truth seeps in like light! like sound!
We cannot turn to sleep.
We stand upon the shoulders and the branches and the cells
of the living, and the dead,
of striving unnamed billion billion creatures,
four million years to find a voice to shape the words
and minds to shape the waking dream.
Which equinox is this?
The balance wobbles. (Oh! I pray it's spring.)
Will it make a difference if the dreamers know they dream?
This living fabric so painfully hard won
from stone and time and entropy,
this living fabric struggling towards voice
wears thin beneath
the very numbers of our feet
and surging waters of our flesh.
The shoulders that we stand on fail, and failing, fall.
And the voices sound around us:
We all must rise together or none shall rise at all.
Copyright ©1992 Munro Sickafoose
