“Caverns Measureless to Man”
If you came here looking for a good time
you missed the detour sign
illumination of another’s world
once shared, is a sacred Halloween
that leads you wondering lost forever
through caverns measureless to man
what’s behind you is too dark to turn around
what’s in front of you, pulls you forward eternally
so, you are caught up in the rhyme of it all
and as if in a dream, your curious nature -
that which resides within you, calls you further in
all warnings ignored
illumination of another’s world
once shared, is a sacred Halloween
that leads you wondering lost forever
through caverns measureless to man
all warnings ignored
Candide Diderot. ‘25
“The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves”
This little we have is a lifetime.
A day in the sun and the dark
is all this little we have.
If we blossomed at the speed of most flowers
hours would be the little we have.
A child is the span of the world,
a person, the whole of its history.
If we could catch just one moment
it would be a moment
that contained all that is or ever will be.
Tell your life-stories to the moon,
tell the world all that you have done
or not done. Name that story,
then watch it disappear
as a whisp of mist in sunlight.
Fiction is timeless.
To measure up the moments
How measureless they be
‘Til toil consumes and life concludes
We notice – suddenly
That ‘twas not so immeasurable
Nor not so ponderous
But with a token patience
We could have counted all
And whether life had beckoned
And sped a firmer hand
Or whether it ease gradually
A snail upon the sand
So much had thus been granted
And yet so little still
That had we truly tallied
We'd perish – unfulfilled
The river flows on,
Though there are murky forests
On its either side.
A man he would a-measuring go
With compass, scales and string.
The ambition he harboured
To measure the height,
To measure the width,
To measure the length,
To measure the weight,
To measure the strength
Of every, no every conceivable thing.
And so it was that he spent his life
Measuring all from his toes to his wife.
What, you would meet him? Oh, that cannot be,
One day he tried to measure the sea.
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