What did you do once you knew?
Recently I had to cope with the untimely death of my youngest son, a very sad and distressing experience that is referenced in my earlier post… The meaning of life is to give it away…and which, amongst other things, confronted me with the reality of my own mortality. Not long after I attended a Melbourne Readers Festival interview with Bob Brown, the former leader of the Australian Greens, about his new book ‘Optimism: Reflections on a Life of Action’>. During question time, a member of the audience asked Bob how he had found the courage to stand up for what he believed in, so often against formidable odds and at great personal cost. Bob replied that it was the fear of reaching the end of his life and realising that he hadn’t done what he could have to help preserve our planet for future generations. The fear that he would not be able to answer the questions posed by the ‘great great grandchildren’ in Drew Dellinger’s poem The Hieroglyphic Stairway quoted below. As I approach the latter years of my life the questions posed by Drew Dellinger’s poem become more pressing and the need for a courageous answer more urgent. I sometimes wish that these questions had confronted me much earlier in my career but I also know that –
‘Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin’ (Mother Teresa) and
‘The future depends on what you do today. ‘(Mahatma Gandhi)
It’s 3:23 in the morning
and I’m awake
because my great great grandchildren
won’t let me sleep
my great great grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do while the planet was plundered?
what did you do when the earth was unraveling?
surely you did something
when the seasons started failing?
as the mammals, reptiles, birds were all dying?
did you fill the streets with protest
when democracy was stolen?
what did you do
once
you
knew?
I’m riding home on the Colma train
I’ve got the voice of the milky way in my dreams
I have teams of scientists
feeding me data daily
and pleading I immediately
turn it into poetry
I want just this consciousness reached
by people in range of secret frequencies
contained in my speech
I am the desirous earth
equidistant to the underworld
and the flesh of the stars
I am everything already lost
the moment the universe turns transparent
and all the light shoots through the cosmos
I use words to instigate silence
I’m a hieroglyphic stairway
in a buried Mayan city
suddenly exposed by a hurricane
a satellite circling earth
finding dinosaur bones
in the Gobi desert
I am telescopes that see back in time
I am the precession of the equinoxes,
the magnetism of the spiraling sea
I’m riding home on the Colma train
with the voice of the milky way in my dreams
I am myths where violets blossom from blood
like dying and rising gods
I’m the boundary of time
soul encountering soul
and tongues of fire
it’s 3:23 in the morning
and I can’t sleep
because my great great grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do while the earth was unraveling?
I want just this consciousness reached
by people in range of secret frequencies
contained in my speech
–Hieroglyphic Stairway, Drew Dellinger, 2003