You see them vanish in their speeding cars, <br />The many people hastening through the world, <br />And wonder what they would have done before <br />This time of time speed distance, random streams <br />Of molecules hastened by what rising heat? <br />Was there never a world where people just sat still? <br /> <br />Yet they might be all of them contemplatives <br />Of a timeless now, drivers and passengers <br />In the moving cars all facing to the front <br />Which is the future, which is destiny, <br />Which is desire and desire's end - <br />What are they doing but just sitting still? <br /> <br />And still at speed they fly away, as still <br />As the road paid out beneath them as it flows <br />Moment by moment into the mirrored past; <br />They spread in their wake the parading fields of food, <br />The windowless works where who is making what, <br />The grey towns where the wishes and the fears are done.<br /><br />Howard Nemerov<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/fugue/
