Everything is Ending
A poem from lockdown
“Everything is ending,” you insist,
“nothing will ever be the same, after this.”
It’s true — everything is ending.
Everyone is dying. Everyone you love,
and the ones you despise.
Even you.
(Of course, we’re mostly still living too. Even the dead go on,
whispering, in the half-life of the imagination,
stories that pattern the world.
But that’s another story, for another day.)
Here is the order of things:
Each morning the brash sun slays gentle night,
banishes the lovesongs of frogs and cicadas,
lets in the balance of the light
which sparkles in the brief dew for a little while.
From vapour the day is born, unfolds,
and falls again into darkness.
And the World? It has always been ending:
see the shivering skin of the frozen lake —
the fractal flowers of flame —
the ocean, shapeless shaper of shores,
unwinding Shiva’s dance of permanent impermanence
grist to the mill of the mind’s mayfly-dance
around the ten-thousand things — each become through
a million deaths, a billion births — ceaselessly unmade and unmaking,
reborn and rebirthing, relentless in its terrible beauty,
World without end
we die each minute,
yet something persists,
changeless in its changing,
punctuated by the fleeting pause between breaths
for every ending, a resurrection
Forget your cherished apocalypse:
it was, it is, it will be — this unending ending,
this beginningless beginning.
OM Shanti Shanti Shanti
There’s nothing left to fear;
welcome, instead, this necessary nothingness,
from which the new might come.
