The Drift

The last dusk of the year
Falls in a pointillist's parade.

Each snowflake is a shard of glass
From a shattered universe,
A spark stricken
From the flint of a life.

See that one?
That snowflake has a dust-mote
At its center.

And at the center of that dust-mote
Is a carbon atom

That Shakespeare once exhaled.

All around us, they are falling,
The great and the wicked,

Bound up in the dance of eternity,
Combining with each other
And with us

To make new
The age-old promise
Of life after life,

Of resurrection after death.

One snowflake is a fluke.
One thousand snowflakes are a pattern.
One million snowflakes are a drift.

One snowstorm is a fraction of a moment.

Live this moment with me,
And we shall be blessed.

Happy New Year to you, from--


--Mr. Gobley

When i am cold

When i am cold
i remember the eons
of my pre-existence:

a germ of light
planted at the edge
of the vast womb of
Darkness,

i waited without purpose
and watched without sight.

i can dimly recall
the silence,
the stillness,

the millennia of
not knowing,

And even now
i can summon up
the moment --

the horrifying eternity --
when movement
toward Being began.

When i am cold,
i recall my first passage into warmth:
the horror, the exhilaration
as comprehension dawned,

the mighty struggle
to Become,
even as i yearned
not to Be,

the messiness,
the urgency,
the surging heat.

When i am cold,
i begin to ache for those dark silences --
against my will, to be sure,
and still --

some speck of ash at the center of me
senses the cold,
wants the weightlessness,
embraces the emptiness,
seeks the silence

and welcomes the prospect
of rest
of emptiness
of ceasing the struggle
abandoning the need

to be warmed.

--Mr. Gobley