PASSING INTO ETERNITY II
“Eternity rushes on time’s river
Uprooting all human things
Drowning them all in oblivion
Nations, Kingdoms, Kings
Should some matter still survive
Among the pipes and lyre,
Like everything alive,
It meets its fate,
Landing on eternity’s plate”
Gavrila Derzhavin (1743-1816) (modified)
Wind, breath of Aeolius flowing down
Over the Etruscan hills from Mt. Cronos
We are filled with morning’s air of spring
As we sit, my dog and I on the wall
In front of the kitchen garden
Protecting the narcissi bending in your breath.
O windy spirit
Whose breath streams out from
The zenith of ceaseless time
Carry us in your arms
Over these hills wrapped in your eternal flow
The stars are watching so too the starlings.
Arise, we start a walk down the grassy fields
Crushing the dewy morning’s growth under foot.
And all our little world stretches out wide below
As our gaze grabs hold of the open view
A verdant green going down into an emerald sea
Where saints have walked for an eternity
The old dry brittle couple who walks the town
And hills each day to keep death at bay pass by
Asking the dog’s name because their memory was passing too
It seemed they wanted to know the name of the poet I was reading
The Russian, you dear Osip, you who died in prison
But even that prison has passed away by now
A stone farmhouse is collapsing crumbling into its destiny of dust
On worn roadside noisy and unrepaired we watch the traffic passing
And shun the barking of dogs from car’s open windows
Back up the slope we tread on a well-worn goat-paths
But all the goats and sheep today have long moved on
A small house with one room looks down upon the hills
Stopping here I plan a place for me, where I shall have some peace
Peace passing slowly towards the sea before I too flow into eternity
By then the old couple will be long gone
The starlings, sheep and goats, the traffic and the narcissi too.
Only the sea and sun, the stars and wind will remain to outlast everything passing today
For the throat of time will have swallowed them all in an oblivion of fate and memory.
All this I know yet in its face I am as indifferent as the Wind.
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