We insist on the past,

and the future too,

while patiently nudging us there in between

lives that old master catalyst of time: Today.

 

Today; how unwittingly we use it as time for some other time.

We keep so busy planning tomorrow,

then carefully we embalm it for yesterday’s archives,

all during the interlude of today.

We ravage the earth today in the name of our children’s tomorrow,

insensitive to the life we bruised somewhere between the gift wrap and the gift of their inheritance.

 

We surrender the Present for a Past and Future that would give up everything to stir just once in the arms of today.

 

Today; the great adjournment.

Time’s middle child dreaming again in the antechamber.

Emerging sunrise which, like so many loves, descends mysteriously upon the ascent.

 

Yet only in today are the forces of polarization given opportunity again

to meet somewhere in the middle,

where wisdom conceives love.

And only in today—corpus callosum of human existence; bridge upon which Past and Future meet; Either meets Or; and Life, Death—only in today can we make the fundamental connection among all things considered.

 

And in that moment of moments

time,

like the soaring eagle,

opens its wings to the vastness:

 

—Flight of the human spirit redeemed—

 

O Today!

 

June 1973