THE BIG QUESTIONS, 27: GRAVESTONE SCRAPING (WHAT, INDEED, DO WE KNOW ABOUT ETERNITY?)

This is Poem #27 of my series of poems in response to the Big Questions to mark National Poetry Month (NaPoMo April 2013). What, indeed, do we know about eternity? Has anyone come back from the other side to tell us what we have known by faith or what we can hope to know before we kick the bucket?

 

 

 

 

GRAVESTONE SCRAPING

Has anyone come back from this defiled form

and mapped out ways to get back to that eternity
we claim as heirs to, where days are as chartless
as the river stream that must flow to an endless,
ceaseless fountainhead which has no beginning?
There is no other way back except by destruction.

When every rampart has been carted away, we

do not pine for them like those we cannot lose
because we store them in vaults of our memory:
they are our milestones of an afterlife we choose
to build from achieved desires, fulfilled dreams--
these chambers of a heart that will not crumble.

What, indeed, do we know of eternity? Save this:

We are never away from it. Until memory fades.

---ALBERT B. CASUGA