I speak with the future

Pi Longo

We sit on our skeletons’ bones. 

We hear with our skeletons’ bones.

We speak of beauty by moving our jaws and our teeth.

The original meaning of Paradise: a place, 

a walled garden. 

Our lives, our stories, this hour inside one.

A staircase from Piranesi. A hummingbird drinking.

Outside it, vanishing species and rivers.

Outside it, Nanjing, Ninevah, Dresden.

Outside it, Gaza, Sudan, Myanmar, Kyiv. Here.

The world starts and ends, starts, ends, ends again,

restarts.  

A kalpa is brief, and wall-less.

Unborn ones, take nothing for granted.

Not nectar, not thirst.

May your lives be uneclipsed, your failures be passing.

May you have your portions of beauty, of grief, 

in a garden whose plants and birds I cannot imagine. 

Jane Hirshfield