After Revelations

Knowing doesn’t change being
What is at this moment splashing in your eyes
Strung across your forehead like prayer flags
Slapping your face with the smack of the present
Shaking your shoulders with the snap of now
Is not in any way modified or altered
By any kind of sapience
Of what will
Inevitably be

That you will open your eyes one day
And find them gone
Doesn’t stop the morning from crashing
Like a rhinoceros through the porcelain dawn
A future vision of vanishing tail lights
Empty chairs at the kitchen table
Tidy, dusty, silent bedrooms
Does not erase fatigue
Nor transform the existent ache
For breathing space
A private moment
The time to think

How odd to be human
When knowing the future
Being all too aware of imminent
Events, equations, emotions
Doesn’t change an iota
Of the dance of
Now

I remember mornings
That peeled my eyelids open
Like the rip of surgical tape
When two small girls
Shook the stasis of the planet
And threw it off it’s axis
And I was embroiled,
Consumed, absorbed,
Immersed in the
Immediate

I opened my eyes one day
And found them gone


©Edwina Peterson Cross