We watched their futures become our past

As our days we slowly passed

we watched their futures become our past

In all those instants nothing changes

Then all at once it’s rearranged

Born as children, not like those with that white hair

Yet slowly we assume their shady chairs

As three generations pass while we grow tall

At last we become the next to fall

The minutes pass at first so slowly: Summer never seems to come

then the years fly by so quickly, as life flees before it's done

Through all our moments we string together

a tiny blurred fraction, we think of as forever

So slowly do our days we gather

it takes quite a while til nothing matters

Cast with fossil bones or glimpsed as insects trapped in amber

Brief, sideways glances we now scarcely remember

Our lives and history seemed to be so everlasting

in brief insights revealed by merest instants flashing

Long awaited events stored in half-remembered jumbles

Lives so short, but memories only incoherent mumbles

Time spent always looking forward to myriad trivia

Then off into the insensate void, delivered to an empty oblivion

In the end and looking back, it seemed as if it were quite long

yet I know I could not finish my confused little song

Both far away and long ago take on different aspects

On that day we stare back so blankly from empty caskets

Still we bend to pray for guidance with our knees to the earth

round our sun inside the galaxy, within a cluster, in just one universe

Having written in the beach sand, the hand of man, it shortly pauses

and just as quickly all life ends of insensate causes

Just as all things we thought important so surely disappeared

Their monuments and their memories shall no longer be revered

In the eternal mountains we lay our dead to rest in peace forever

though science tells us the peaks will not resist the weather

We work away the many years with vague promises to ponder later

then comes the day that quickly ends our short stay here

Our breaths will have a finite number, our heartbeats too, a small round figure

But time in the void cannot be grasped by any mathematical rigor

Long the sunset, fine the twilight, in that wondrous, warm June summer

but at last full darkness must induce, a perpetual and dreamless slumber