The Words Ceased To Want Themselves And Longed For A World Outside Poem by Shalom Freedman

THE WORDS CEASED TO WANT THEMSELVES AND LONGED FOR A WORLD OUTSIDE

The words ceased to want themselves and longed for a world outside
The world outside dumb and beautiful wanted nothing of anyone
We the intermediaries plied our trade describing and revising whatever we perceived
But we were not the ones we thought we should be
We were not the messengers of Light and Hope to distant worlds
They had their own forms of speaking that we cannot hear
And so we programmed our great messages down through the ages
To read only the cryptic path of our own troubled minds
We are not the code of every living thing
Or the final messenger to the last star
Or the only single secret sound God wants heard over and over again
We are not the prayer- leaders of the sacred congregation of the galaxies
Deeper than all darkness and dark- matter deeper even than our own souls

We are a faint flickering
A minor music
An insubstantial voice
That is pretending to go round and round and round again and again and again
Forever
But is only a single passage a one way ticket one way word
A trip which even if it goes to the end of the universe
Will one day end.

Oh Death how you have defeated us all
Even when we in Youth knew you did not exist
How you waited and ambushed our dreaming.