This is the 2nd poem I’ve come upon written in 1999, so woefully up to date I feel I must send it out. Called Gone In A Minute.
Gone In A Minute
An avalanche, a mud slide ,
Every meter drenched and plastered,
Gliding and colliding, guided
By terrain alone,
And crash, boom, clang,
The whole shebang is gone.
People! Yes, of course!
Their words and art;
The future’s start.
Centuries of minds,
Mines of thinking gone:
In a non-thinking wink.
How long then, family name?
The worked for fame?
Volcanic ash, a lava stream,
Centuries of verse, and worse,
Memory all creamed away.
Fire, flood, the drowned, the charred:
Things no longer anything;
The best and worst on equal footing.
Wars: the scarred, disfigured, marred
And all the future Bachs, Picassos,
Jenny Linds, Carusos,
Shakespeares, Einsteins,
(not to mention Arlene Corwins)
Never to expand a wing,
Create a thing,
The crux is, what we bring to mind
How easy and complete,
How fast defeat
Comes to a globe
Once calamity’s in orbit.
And we wonder what is worth it, what is not,
Ask what lasts when pasts wiped out
Leave nothing.
Gone In A Minute 8 22.2020/improved from1.2.1999 Our Times, Our Culture II; Circling Round Experience; Arlene Nover Corwin