Hourglass

Minutes, hours, centuries, millennia–

Torrents of time that, taken alone, are unremarkable–

All come funneling through the hourglass at once,

And I, inside, buried in the swirl of measures,

Watch, bewildered, scared, as eternities slip through my fingers–

Upward.

The endless dunes, wastelands of yesteryear–

The weights that kept me grounded–

Gone, and I kneel exposed,

In awe and shaking with….

Fear?

I see familiar footprints in the now-transparent, endless, rolling landscape,

Leading from one era to the next,

Traversing lifetimes to connect the dots between every reality conceivable,

All stretched out over the entirety of existence.

Scenes of the exotic, the ancient, transposed

Over this “normal” and this “now.”

You see….

Today I hear in the bustle of the subway station

What yesterday you will play in the still hours of a mountain morning on your ocarina

And which tomorrow I performed before an ancient king in his court to welcome you home.

And on this underground note,

The soundtrack to my desert wanderings,

I toss a token of gratitude to the prophetic piper

While we rush to catch different trains on the same track

Which will collide for the thousandth time

In a fearsome, brilliant spray of sparkling sand

No sooner have we learned to let the minutes pass us by

And the moments carry us along.