CHANGES

CHANGES

Changes, as constant as they are intriguing,

slither through as coldly as serpents move

into crevices not unlike meandering fog.  

Inexorable patterns, they are the unchanging

streams running through the cherished fables

we tell and retell until they become a reality 

we cannot escape however sanguinely we try

to build walls to ward them off chambers

of fear housing our hapless lives. Hopeless. 

Every sunrise fades into a sundown, all lives

dwindle with discarded days, anguish turns

into ecstasy and loops around like a storm.

What grows in spring withers in summer,

then, like twigs blown off in autumn’s fall,

get buried in winter frost, a carrion of a year.  

Why struggle then for eternity? Nothing lasts.

That story about a lost paradise is still grit

for an unchanging story once upon a time. 

Could changes have been that fruit in Eden?

An apple stuck in his throat, it bobs forever

like an intruding promise that everything  

must perish even in paradise. The rot here

then is forever. Flotsam of ruined homes,

debris of broken lives, all tombs of betrayal. 

Would a morning ever come, as we sip tea,

when like a wave laving the shore, it ebbs

only to crawl back at all sunrises and sunsets,

never ceasing, never leaving, never changing?  

--- Albert B. Casuga