The Wait of the World: Act Two

The Wait of the World, a poem in three acts 

by Helen Harrop

June 2012

Act Two:
The world waits,
The world watches
Each extinguished epoch
With the ignoble grace
Of a billiard ball
Unwrinkled by time.
The world is a spinning spectator
As race follows race
With no winners or losers.

The earth continues
With no worries of science
Or physics, or gravity.
Simply everything in its place
And a place for Everything.
No historic histrionics
Just a past-less presence
With no fear to furrow brows.
The world just is and always was
The universe’s eternal yes.

The globe endures
Impermanent parasites;
A barely perceptible,
Innumerable nuisance.
From ethereal single-cells
To insignificant Jurassic beasts;
All imaginary mosquitoes
Evidenced only by their egos
And their venomous bites.
All fury beasts,
All faithless and dreaming,
All fearful and hiding,
All hopeless and hurting,
All hate-filled and hunting,
All pestilence and predation.

The earth devours their dead
Builds mountains from their bones
And forests from their fallen flesh,
Drawing their blood into its corpulent core.
Deaf to their desperate prayers,
Unmoved by their moods and means.
Blind to the damage they do,
The earth lives on in fermitude, not servitude.
Each eon blinked by and instantly forgotten.

The world waits,
The world watches
As the moon conducts tides and
The sun devours time and
The universe opens its waiting arms.

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