Methuselah

Methuselah, White Mountain, California - photo taken by Yen Chao

This is a poem from The Cape House, a book that my father wrote.

Methuselah

He sat in his room afterwards

Slowly recuperating

Looking back on his life

Thinking about time

What it was

Where it came from

Where it went

What he’d done with his allotment

Wondering if it really

Just ran in a straight line

And passed by

And disappeared into nothingness

Lost forever

Except for what could be recorded

In books

Or photographs

Or memories

If that was the case

What would be left at the end?

Of an individual life

Or the whole species

When that single existence

Or the sun

Burned itself out

Nothing?

A grave filled only with bones

A box holding a jumble of pictures

A dark library with no visitors

It seemed hard to believe

Pointless

And those dead?

Where did they go?

When their time ran out

In this visible world

Back to the earth

And nowhere else?

But what if time had other dimensions?

Or other branches

Or it flowed in different directions

What if Spags was right?

And when you died

You saw the people you knew in life

Death

No longer an end

Or a barrier

Or a dividing line

And relationships that needed to be managed

On both sides of the grave

That would complicate things a bit

He might need to start thinking about that

Time was running out

And yet

Time

Might

Never end

by M.W. Brown

You can buy this book and many others within the M.W. Brown collection on Amazon.