Selleck Hill

Time changes nothing.  Look around you now.

The world is all the same – the people too.

We make safe homes, in clusters, cheek to cheek,

Resent our neighbors, and rely on them.

We love, grow bored, raise children, drive them off,

Welcome them back, love more, swift-slowly die;

Our children, then, have children; then

Their children do and die, and nothing’s new.

We scar the earth; it heals, or doesn’t heal;

We breed survivors, and the earth does too.

Wars happen, wisely or by accident,

And wise wars kill as many as the rest.

Great men, great women, rise and fall,

Remembered and forgotten, gone and gone.

Time changes nothing.  Look around you now.

Fall falls, and winter freezes; then the spring,

Grateful or hateful to the human heart,

Buds forth in raw magnificence, and soon

The summer sprawls out endless, ripe as joy.

You sit.  The leaves are color.  Light is light.

You sit in silence, waiting for the rhyme.

Time changes nothing, but it leaves you this:

This life, this moment, this brief gift of time.