Ephemeral Slow Rain.
I cry, not from the pain, well not in the direct sense,
rather, I cry because I recognize the pain is temporary,
and the joy the pain will win, it too will be temporary.
All the things that make me happy,
share the share the fate of those that don’t.
I’ve missed moments in moments
and sat back years later knowing I was right to miss it then.
and now, I don’t just miss this moment,
I miss this youth, this youth I’m so afraid to lose,
because only youth keeps death back and then –
it so often doesn’t.
So, we fixate, we focus,
we embrace evanescence and ephemerality,
and we do what we can to pause,
to extend moments,
to slow the rapidly faster clock.
We stare,
stare at the orange light that fills this world
and seems to do so at this time every year.
The image makes us think of things we’ve already thought,
and we hover for a moment,
but don’t return to them,
they’re gone to the time.
But still we look, now at the flower;
pedals white but embracing the light of the sun,
embracing the colour, it’s being given, embracing its fate,
it’s fickle nature, it’s inability not to embrace it.
All pedals lead back to plant.
At its centre, its core is yellow,
distinctly itself, but not untouched by fate.
The conjunction of temporal setting.
Below it, the green of the past holds it in its place.
The stem, the history, the foundation of a plant.
And yet she too spreads out with her own arms,
not recognizing that her time is gone, her purpose filled.
And then we sit back, and we realize,
we aren’t the person looking at the flower,
at least not anymore.
Now we sit looking at our painting of the flower.
How it captures so little of the likeness
but is that cherished flower all the same.
And we think how in the depths of winter that flower must feel pain,
but the painting, the water and pigment, it too was dying.
It will outlast the flower,
it will outlast the painter,
the poet,
the pain,
the joy,
but it too is temporary.
And the poet and the painter and the little boy who loves flowers cry,
because they still haven’t found eternity.
Figure 3. The Horses