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