The Trinity Of Past, Present & Future...Surreal Poem by John Tansey

I will remember forever, this image
of you, me and brandon
walking the park in winter,
snow crunching beneath our feet.

A crisp, cold morning,
sun glinting off the ice,
the wing of a gull, hung
like a white sheet in the wind.

Our voices bouncing, like fine china,
off the pristine drifts
came back, younger, like children
with the cracked fragments of the past.

As I looked into the sun, its trinity
of past, present and future,
I saw three tenses of time,
converged in the light.

Drifting in and out of the snow
blinded by its whiteness.
time lost all chronology
to the metaphor of dream.

Squinting my eyes
beneath the visor of cupped hands,
I watched the silhouette of my child,
pull a sled to the top of the hill,

The sun directly behind,
his red curls like solar flares
spiraling into the sky,
eclipsing the sun with a face,

Which I swore was mine up there
thirty years ago,
I, my dad, my wife, the mother,
he divorced himself from.

Later, the day ended,
it’s degrees of sun fading,
as the time-elapsed years
of my whole life unfolding before me,

Thirty years passed in that evening,
driving by the park, children gone,
swings squeaking, ghosts came creeping in
with the earth’s mist beneath a full moon.

At thirty-three, I became you, my son,
your mother and I, my parents-
slipping into history, the course of events
as foreseen, could not be undone.


Thirty years passed in that evening,
driving by the park, children gone,
swings squeaking, ghosts came creeping in
with the earth’s mist beneath a full moon.

At thirty-three, I became you, my son,
your mother and I, my parents-
slipping into history, the course of events
as foreseen, could not be undone.