Think of it as a birthday of a close, personal friend - one who has stuck by you every day of your life ... What can be done to show appreciation ...
and an excerpt from a piece by the poet Janice Johnston Howie ...
EARTH SONG
Relentless ... awesome,
trudging onward, an invincible monster,
vast and unseizable.
Almost mocking, but actually indifferent
for nothing we do impacts its trajectory at all.
On and on, with or without us,
throughout anything ... despite everything ...
la "machine infemale"
of which nothing can halt the serene and sinister momentum.
It orbits a cycle, then pausing, resolves ... comfortably,
with a defeatism that is not immediately, if ever, apparent.
And we, poor, deluded, pompous creatures,
with age and erosion, finally shrug in resignation,
somehow relieved by a return of the familiar,
profoundly grateful for a reprieve,
throw up our hands, raise our eyes to the heavens and sigh ...
"Ah well ... what can you do?"
as, dispassionately, the cycle mutates a little, and recurs.
Listen ... here it comes again ... on and on and round and round,
lost in the concentric circles of Dante's Hell,
the stupefying maze of Camus' Amsterdam canals,
where ring upon ring of muddy waters lurk below murky skies ...
till we have ... gratefully ... no clear idea of beginning nor end ...
as the familiar spirographs and distorts geometrically -
or takes fearful, quantum leaps into the unimaginable,
as illusions of 'control' and 'normality' recede ...
imperceptibly ...
as if they had ever been anything more than a dream.
[J.J.Howie © 2003]
partially inspired by the music of Earth Song
