What is now?
Where is it and how?
Focus on a fixed point. That glazed ochre rock
Seen through the glass of the shrine room.
Use that firm rooted stasis to unlock
The mind from its gibbering. The Atlantic spume
Leaps from the slapped crags and strives to a height,
Dissipating, fading as it rises, merging into the cloudlight.
What is is and when
Does it become then?
Beyond in the bay the ocean masses its forces,
Marshals its energy to attack the shore.
An elemental cavalry of white flecked horses
Thunders to the rocks, stirs the swaying seaweed to furore,
Retreats and regroups and gathers for a new assault,
Centuries of patience to test the rock for frailty or fault.
For the rock is not timeless. Turning its stoic cheek
To the Atlantic’s blows, is it more fixed than the dispersing spray?
The unforgiving attrition of the relentless waves will wreak
Destruction upon the ancient stones until one day,
Powdered to grains of sand swirled by bullying waves
From new generations, they are washed into the caves.
That is no cavalry; the ocean, mindless, does not attack;
The waves have no patience. The deluding brain
Struggles to give purpose to chaos. The lack
Chills, isolates. In the time it takes to find
A word to bestow meaning, snare the phenomenon –
Does “wave” freeze the fading reality like a photo? – it’s gone.
As twilight comes the clouds flatten into bluish grey
Over the olive ocean. The sky is becoming a blank
When, creeping into the sight over the bay,
A rainbow arches across the mountains, one foot in the dank
Fields, the other dipping into the sea.
Shedding colours the rainbow fades and ceases to be.
That was then, this is now.
That was now.
What is to be becomes is.
When does now become was?
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