We must live into our own time

Lines written on a napkin in an Irish pub in New York City in 1994:

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.

For commentary, I will simply add these lines from my Dreamer's Book of the Dead, written a decade later: 

During our lives on Earth we can become overwhelmed by memories of another life, perhaps a life involving dramas with previous versions of people we know in our present time - to the point where we can forget to live the life we have been given now. We can also become prisoners of simplistic determinism, telling each other that we and others are fated to live out certain experiences and endure various sufferings because of mistakes we made or obligations that were laid on us in a past life experience. We can only respond to these things well if we rise to the understanding that the moment of power is always now.

photo (c) Robert Moss