We must live into our own time

We must live into our own time.

The memories of the broken cord,
the nest emptied of its young,
the lost love, the knocking at the ribs,
at the midnight door, the starling silences
cannot help us here.

Yet their tremulous rising,
dropletted as from the dawn sea,
is almost more than we can bear
and enough to turn houses upside down,
break families and the destiny of a present life.

There is danger in knowing our other selves,
danger in remembering too much, too soon,
of what lay beyond the stiff portal of birth.

Yet life itself in its endless wheelings
through the blur of feathers, through wind and sun
brings us face to face with the Other -
face of desire, face of the heart’s highest longing,
face of red hatred, face of cold fear -
and we are called, backward or forward
(whose time prevails now?)
into another life, and the forking paths of soul.

- Lines about soul in the multiverse recorded on a napkin in an Irish pub, nearly quarter of a century ago. And they stir my heart again, and I feel connections with other dramas, in other times, stir with me.

photo by RM