Past-Present-Future, a Collective Responsibility

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber

A reader asks why I often write past-present-future as one word rather than separating past, present and future.  The interconnection is so great that I see them as a whole; just as time is a continuum so all we say and do at any one time will like as not affect and reflect not only ourselves, but others too - one way or another, to a greater or lesser extent, but significantly all the same  (whether we or they choose to  acknowledge it or not) in any near or distant moment in time.

As for the world in which we human beings persistently express a penchant for destruction and division ... is it not high time we focused more on pulling together, accepting and respecting each other's differences instead of playing socio-cultural religious-political football with them?

Any tears in the ozone layer will not mend themselves unless we all become more pollution conscious and stop arguing among ourselves long enough to take an honest look as how we are inflicting all but irretrievable damage to the planet.

Those leading politicians, with fingers in various Big Business pies, may well choose to play down the long-term effects of polluting the planet, but need to cut the rhetoric and act NOW or risk plunging future generations into an Armageddon scenario…

PAST-PRESENT-FUTURE, A COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY 

In the rain, an acid rain, you’re there

sharing the burden of my despair

Let the world roll out its history

consigning us to memory,

clouds forbid the sun, heavens weep;

in my dark, your light I’ll keep,

till this mere flesh no more can stand

and Death lends us a hand

as through a graveyard in a gentle rain

we ghosts will walk and talk again

In the rain, an acid rain, you’re there,

sharing the burden of my despair

Though our world blast into infinity,

consigning us to the galaxy,

yet seedlings shall survive, endure

in Mother Nature's loving care

till songbirds, in time, return

to the killing fields of Everyman,

redeem a so-sorry history of acid rain

till humankind ghost us yet again

In the rain, an acid rain, we’re here

sharing the burden of all despair

Copyright R. N. Taber 2007; 2014

  

[Note: An earlier version of this poem appears under the title ‘Easing the Burden’ in Accomplices to Illusion by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2007.]