KNOWING THE PLACE
We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.---T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, Little Gidding
Sunrise on a highway ridge baffles us.
This could be sundown elsewhere
by the bay in Poro Point, a merging
of origins, east or west, a cycle of living
and dying on the reef, a coming and going
on the harbour of fishing boats and war
machines, a pot of stirred calm and tempest
really, where remembering and forgetting
are sides of the same coin---memories
made, buried, raised, extinguished or
lived again in a string of moments, a nest
of surprises that defines the journey
of a man as symbol of a moving object,
wandering back and forth (willy-nilly)
from nothing to something, something
to nothing, being-non-being, body-mind
soul---all in one simple brownbag
of wonder and questions: Why is there
something when there could be nothing?
Quite like that silly white-tailed squirrel
wandering, wondering where it last buried
a nut or a memory of one, as its quaint
prompter of an imitation of life:
a movement here, a movement there,
all really meaning a stillness of finding
where the end is also his beginning,
a circle at last where a hole defines his
next-of-kin. He arrives home only to ask:
Am I here? Is there anybody home?
---ALBERT B. CASUGA
We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.---T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, Little Gidding
Sunrise on a highway ridge baffles us.
This could be sundown elsewhere
by the bay in Poro Point, a merging
of origins, east or west, a cycle of living
and dying on the reef, a coming and going
on the harbour of fishing boats and war
machines, a pot of stirred calm and tempest
really, where remembering and forgetting
are sides of the same coin---memories
made, buried, raised, extinguished or
lived again in a string of moments, a nest
of surprises that defines the journey
of a man as symbol of a moving object,
wandering back and forth (willy-nilly)
from nothing to something, something
to nothing, being-non-being, body-mind
soul---all in one simple brownbag
of wonder and questions: Why is there
something when there could be nothing?
Quite like that silly white-tailed squirrel
wandering, wondering where it last buried
a nut or a memory of one, as its quaint
prompter of an imitation of life:
a movement here, a movement there,
all really meaning a stillness of finding
where the end is also his beginning,
a circle at last where a hole defines his
next-of-kin. He arrives home only to ask:
Am I here? Is there anybody home?
---ALBERT B. CASUGA
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