AN ODE TO THE BEGINNING
In the beginning was the past
And the past was with the beginning
Morphed into a cursed present, with selective amnesia;
Still, both live, in myriad forms: human monuments,
Today, perching between faded, dusty pages
With our umbilical cords knotted within those pages
To light up the dark regions of the mind.
The past lives:
Crusty like a weather beaten giant rock
With a shadow, towering, mighty, and concrete –
In the dusky sky that dares us stare:
An eyewink duel that clips and shames
The wandering present’s busy passivity
In endless speed duped modernity.
Yet, backward glances over the shoulders
In crisis moments char firm conviction
Into ashes of baffled certainty
We crawl backwards into, and peep from,
Hollow holes in self-reproach
At the costly price of a sedative existence.
And what do we see when we stare back
From peeping hollow holes?
Is it not clear that the past has –
Keen, tireless eyes
Large, patient ears
Loud, firm lips,
And a wagging, flaming tongue
Equally sharpened on both ends
To wring with a wreath
Or wrought with a wrath?
Take heed you scribes of this land
Take heed when you thrust your hand
Into yesterday’s basket and cast out
Pearls and gold for junks –
For, if the marble is lost to you
On what shall we build this castle?
Take heed you countryman or woman
That says “Let’s bury all that in the past
And leave it to rot to the bones” –
Those bones shall rise again.
And where would you go when its ghost
Comes demanding a human sacrifice
To blunt its appetite?
The past is a flowering garden
And a quaking grave yard of memory:
A benchmark and a sight of changeless change –
An organic cycling circle of perpetual being and non-being;
A nursing mill for birth and rebirth;
The breast that suckles all to infantile lisping,
Toddling, bristling youthful blinkers,
Then slow, steady, meditative adult steps,
And then back to memory as essence for the unborn –
Interrupted, this organic cycling circle
Muscles up with poetic justice.
© Clevis Tardzenyuy
01/05/2025