The Present leads
to an unknown future,
but perusing the past,
I'm a bit like a god.
The past is an interest-bearing investment,
an estate enclosing more territory each day,
a delta always creating land.
Now, in my late 50s
I'm a great landowner, a don,
unable to survey all my holdings at once,
even from the highest hill.
I have to take
to the winding back roads.
Whole years I'd forgotten
come into view.
Everything is growing,
rooted in soil.
I didn't know the past bloomed
with such passionate,
poignant blossoms —
stabs of purple,
clouds of pink —
or yielded such succulent fruit.
Blossoms have faces and speak,
resurrected old homes straddle valleys,
memories graze on hillsides
and lumber, exotic beasts,
in tangled jungles.
I return from the winding roads
knowing there are still more such loops.
I feel strongly satisfied
and perplexed: how
the tiny sharecropper's back yard
I knew as a young man
has accrued to this,
and what Hand
has watered once-arid lands
and made them fertile.
And I wonder that people say,
'The past is dead', when I find it
so alive and almost as unknown
as what has not yet even been dreamed.
I marvel at how the every day
has been transformed,
becoming fecund
yet retaining its character.
And though I do not live in the past,
it is the foundation
upon which I stand
Max Reif
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-past-13/
