No Promised Land,
for prophets are bleached in forgotten valleys,
their perfect god-sewn futures
scattered like whitened bones.
We wake at each turn of sun and moon to find
yesterday’s certainties perhaps like ash,
or maybe empty maps to nowhere,
drawn in children’s blood.
Human dreams fracture against
time’s granite wall, while Earth
shrugs off our immortal templates
and sophistry about something more.
No Golden Age waits
patient as a lover beyond the horizon,
just this urgent now, raw and demanding,
hungrily cast in new wounds.
Each moment breaks against the next
like waves against indifferent shores,
while we tread on softening sands
in this precarious balance of now and then.
Between catastrophe and grace
we map our ways through darkened rooms
reaching for doorways that may not exist,
yet still we reach, and seek, and try.

 

24/2/2025