Showing posts with label memory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label memory. Show all posts

Friday, January 23, 2009

The Sphinx 2

The sphinx has seen them come and go. The strong and the wrong, the wise and the wicked, the haughty and the lowly. She has seen elegant structures and torrents of chaos. Great swirling embers of power, and heart, and loss. She has stood both outside the gate and inside the gate, and found them to be the same place. The sphinx has endured the chattering sandstorms of the ages, and has remained unmoved. In her defense, it must be noted that she is made of 270 tons of stone. The sphinx is mostly sedentary.

The sphinx has lived through alphabets and minarets, prophets and parapets; she has emerged smoothened and wizened and so free of fear. She has eaten the choking dust of memory and been fed. She has seen breadths of time lap against impossibly distant shores and even still, she has not yet seen everything. Why is there always something new? What fresh momentum moves these crossing currents, turns these driving wheels, dances these many, many feet?

It's worth considering that the sphinx may not know. Her tears are long dried, baking daily in the punishing heat. For all her years, what has she accrued beyond survey? Her untold wrinkles are untelling. What has she seen but the sights? The world is set in motion, adrift but alight, and our human countless nows weigh nothing.

Our time is weightless but our actions have force. We can run circles around the sphinx, but we can also run forward. Run ecstatic, run through the gates, run in time as though time could never catch up. No, the sphinx does not know. She will never blink or lift a paw. We are the ones, the sands that blow, and breathe, and build.

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Goal Post

Do you remember the day we tore the goal post down?
Then do you remember the next day when we tore the goal post down again?
How about the third day when we were feeling lazy so we waited in the car across the street while the goal post company finished their re-installation, then, before the cement dried, we tore it down?
The fourth day it was getting a little tedious but look - there's another goal post on the opposite end of the field! We tore that one down too.
On the fifth day we were really exhausted so we just intercepted the goal post truck and threw the disassembled bars around until they were good and dented.
The sixth day was Sunday, we did nothing but pray.
That seventh day we were feeling well-rested, so we tore both goal posts down, trashed the gym and beat up the groundskeeper.
Don't you remember any of this? Really? I do, like it was yesterday, though it was really seven days ago.

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