Tenses Poem by Ananta Madhavan

Every moment that passes,
We live in the discarding past.
But every moment coming,
Is from what we call the Future.
How can we be sure
How long it will endure?

Our life, long or short or in-between
Is enacted in a tense
That is neither Past nor Present.
Every moment, unawares,
We are filching the next moment
From a vast treasury, the Future,
And before the next second,
We dump it into history
Or archaeology perhaps,
For successors anonymous
To dig into geological strata
And find skeletal clues to us.

There are variations in Time's grammar,
Like Past Participle and the ‘could have been':
Alfred Tennyson wrote this fond phrase:
"It is better to have loved and lost,
Than not to have loved at all."

I personally love my native Tamil preference
For the Present Continuous tense:
We are surviving, doing all we can
To manage our travails, rejoice in blessings.