A single leaf,
nearly two-thirds torn,
floats idly down a mountain stream,
passing from light into darkness
into light again.
Refracted through the crystalline currents,
a bed of smooth, staid stones
cries, "Eternity! Everlasting!"
but the leaf drifts on.
And I, splashing my way upstream,
thinking myself the keeper
of this shadowed domain,
bend hurriedly
to pluck the leaf from my path.
Then, for just a moment, I hesitate,
to listen as the rivulets
lap against my legs,
longing to hear in them
Heraclitus' lonely, elegiac lament:
"All things are in process;
nothing stays still.
Upon those that step
into the same rivers
different and different waters flow."
But only the rocks sing on --
their same, unchanging song
of the stream's secret source.
And though I,
still deaf to the cry,
hear but the half-uttered echos
of my fleeting thoughts,
I can see,
as the radiant flux of the night
again turns the leaf into light,
how at last we, too, shall step
into that same river twice.
At death --
when in the new-found kenosis of time,
all will be one.
"Kenosis" is a theological term that means self-emptying. It's usually applied to the Incarnation of Christ. But I mean it in a more existential sense, of our -- and time's -- self-emptying at death.