Which Way, And For How Long? Poem by Pamela Ann Frances Crane

Weird life.
All that time, that rolls
Before and around me like an irregular sea.
A pulse of the world s breath beats like a hill;
Miles of time
To move in the mind of the tortoise,
Spacious years
For living and dying
The day-dance of may-flies over the water.

I have borrowed the slow heart-beat
That shortens the day
And swallowed time in a step too vast
To heed the scurry of rabbit-paths in the thickets.
I have ticked an hour into more aeons of time
Than can be counted or conceived by men
Stripped of empathy and
Armed with stones.

The ant burns away a long life,
And the tree,
In the onward rush of seasons.

Trees grow no taller than I;
They watch my life as I would watch an ant.
My day is a second in time
Their day is eternity
To a may-fly.

So what of my strange metabolism
Flung between the particle and the cosmos?
To what end my journeys, lonely as love,
To the last forts of reason?
Which way,
Through lands of a million clocks that tell no more
Than a dandelion puffed away in the wind?