A thousand years ago the candle
was a kind of thinking, stopping,
and someone in a muddy field of 1026
asked the same indifferent sky for rain.

Now the coastlines rewrite themselves
in new beginnings, while cities
have lifted like tents and pitched inland,
the sea keeping its slow appointment
with every map we ever trusted.

Our minds have grown other minds,
luminous, unsleeping, beyond the reach
of our walled vocabularies; they tend
the weather and the rethreaded wheat,
compose fugues for the moons of Mars.

The body is a draft now,
endlessly revising,
winters as eons folded
into one unhurried face,
and still a hand reaches for a hand
in the dark of a kitchen,
still grief arrives
without the courtesy of knocking.

Someone walks into a garden
with a companion close, touching,
and sits beneath a tree
whose roots remember
nothing and everything.

One asks whether their life has mattered.
The companion at their shoulder,
patient as a century, answers kindly,
answers completely,
and the question, answered,
has nowhere left to go.

Above them the calling sky hums
its managed ancient blue,
and no one can recall
who first decided
what was worth becoming.

 

31/10/2026