To Have Been...

One’s lament is often of enigmatic proportions.

To Have Been…

                by Odin Roark

 

To have been a growing face in redwood bark

Looking down for millennia

As children ooh and ah

 

To have been the roiling mist beneath Niagara

Knowing centuries of nature’s basso profondo

Would oscillate in perpetuity

 

To have been a bow-caressed string

Resonating the joy from Joshua Bell’s Stradivarius  

Or the absorbing ebony of Glen Gould’s Steinway

The carefully laden ink of a Shakespeare sonnet

Perhaps a Neruda poem of love

 

To have been of such privilege

Would have required suspended reality

Allowing our imagination to fulfill our lives

 

Some would argue it so

 

For among us making ready

Our next cycle of existence

To have been…

Merely becomes our visceral treasure

Left behind…

 

This time