IF THERE WERE STILL TIME, BUT IT IS LATE

MY POEMS TODAY continue the series of The Great Grief that we might lose our world to the extinction that has begun.


IF THERE WERE STILL TIME, BUT IT IS LATE

There will be time, there will be time/ To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;/…And time yet for a hundred indecisions…---T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

1. It’s Not Too Late

It is not too late, there is still time.
Time enough to start all over again?
Time enough to peel off rotten edges,
Look new as cankered limbs, hearts
Of darkness lit by flickering starlight.
There will be time, and time to save
Even this hapless piece of wriggling
Worm, this man, this shadow of life
Creeping into sunlit shelters where
Crawling is de rigueur for the tenant
Of this place, this earth, this hole
From whose depths we late emerge
From shall so soon expire to claim
An orbit among the rent remains
Of body and soul and his illusions
Of immortality, his undying atoms.


2. It Might be Late

In what world will we find happiness
Again? In what place, a fresh start?
Like that moldy sweet potato left
In a crisper, there must still be a way
To save it for an evening’s repast
When this hunger gnaws no limits
In this suspected late night diner
And one orders something sweet,
Something filling while we wait
For brighter mornings in this desert.
But if that morning will not come.
What is there to save but saving?
It will be late then. Who will require
Bright days, cloudless skies, or joy?


---Albert B. Casuga