One Worries About Age Poem by Raj Arumugam

one worries about age
and how things are different
and how time changes things in one’s mind and life
(one sees many, hears many
in the lives of those ‘good old days’
in the lies of ‘in those days’)
and seeing change, sudden or gradual
change even in one eve, in an artificial division of time
between one year and the next
how the world seems another world
previously bitter now sweet
or now bitter and previously sweet
or just cold, cold and damned all years
after reading a book or after a discourse
a sermon or a revelation
or simply through experience and time:
is there a perception though
(not revealed, not sanctified, not given, not received,
without established authority)
holding no memory, no congealing of thoughts and hurts
and resentments, sweet memories and events
and without rolled-up thought and the past or the future;
a mind past conditioning
a seeing that is timeless and therefore free within;
an insight that is true and clear
and so time or an event has no power to alter or color




and time and thought bring bitterness or nostalgia
and the elusive comforts of altered memories
and the conclave of selective portions of the past:
is there a seeing though that is plain clarity?