On My Birthday

(This is not my birthday...just a "what if" theme) There are a thousand births like mine in that cluster of the noosphere the rolling earth had left behind— where birth and death joined hands to siphon off the heavens in a moment, in a block of space etched by an evanescent time. A thousand births, a hundred years, and altogether disappeared as father of the father of my father will not cause extrusion of a single tear nor anything beyond a dusty line of history—the earth will not look back upon the airless cubicles, and I may smile upon the moment when my father smiled, and let it go. Within that crystal box, and scarce observed there is a breath drawn in, another sent away... a candle life ignited, snuffed, to float out to the stars, unseen, where memory is like the rising mist that one time only may refresh the morning air. ~