This is another poem from my 1980 collection 'Waddon Ponds.' It may seem to...(More)

This is another poem from my 1980 collection 'Waddon Ponds.' It may seem to contradict my other poetical works which emphasise the indestructability of the 'human soul' but it merely points out that personality, that something added to eternal life by the coming forth of the human child, is a temporal attribute. What I may call 'the real us,' the basis of all life, and life itself, is a continuum. Return to Darkness (for Irene Twite who was afraid of dying; but who since I wrote this has herself returned to the dakness) To some it is a terrifying thought that at their death they'll cease to be, blown out like a candle. I cannot see why this should so appal. Before I was born I was not me, had no existence, absent utterly from this universe I've come to know. At my unmaking I again will go back to the black negation whence I came and all will be the same as once before. While earth began I slept apart, slumbered through the start of things beyond the rings of Saturn, past the farthest star whose distant light has not yet reached our ignorant sight to echo in the human eye. I lay swathed in deepest night while all the world was bubbling and oppressed, nothing but a sea of molten fire. Continents cooled. As the first cell formed I dreamed away millennia, unharmed while shrieking creatures fought and tore and Europe was a sea of cracking ice. Rome rose and fell and many empires passed. Then at last in a time of bitter war I felt the first dull stirrings of a care my mother bore; on a tide of pain came forth; took my first breath of the new-found air. Since then I've learned to know and share the beauty of a place so rare the thought of leaving is very hard to bear. But one day I must go for sure. Go where? Why, back into my sleep of course, back into the mothering arms of universal darkness at my end. I'll blend into that element again from which I came; and slumber there while one by one the glittering stars go out.(Less)