Where did it come from?  Where will it go?
I pose the questions, I listen for the answers,
and hear nothing but sibilance
in my defective auditory sense.
But answers there are . . . I know.

Nature has always given the response
That echoed in the nightfall of my soul.
It began in those excursions as a child
and gathered pace in wartime’s exodus,
‘midst shattering of peace and of belief.

‘Twas ever thus, to walk upon the Sussex Downs,
The Surrey Hills, the Essex flats,
To feel the wind upon my cheeks
The song of birdcalls in the air,
And life so full of radiance and joy.

‘Twas ever thus, the yearly trips
To Devon’s headlands and to Cornish beaches.
The voyages across the seas,
the sojourns in yet more distant lands.
Exultation with exheredation.

Decades of travelling, seeking the answers,
so much of the time forgetting the questions;
journeying hither and yon, tracing the clouds
following their dreams, and mine, on shimmering shores,
discovering the sweetness of life grown sour.

And through it all I have known love, excessively,
and never cautiously enough.  A spendthrift
wasting all the wealth of praise and acclamation
in luxuriant homage to his own dissipation,
sleeping with salvation and waking in confusion.

And now, the twilight of a life grown weary
in a constant yet inconstant search for answers,
at last gives way to calamitous acceptance
of the eternal verity.  Ex nihilo is nonsense;
we have no option but to embrace ex materia.

© Joseph Sinclair, May 25 2022