A poet once asked
“What will you do with your one wild and precious life?”
Life– a thing we tamed
into submission,
filled with dismay
at its own yearning
to run with childlike wonder at play.
Yes, life a squandered thing.
.
From the moment we are born,
we are dying.
Yet we waste our days
lost in a daily grinding of things
that must get done.
Instead of stopping the burrs
grinding us into dust,
we’ve added algorithms
to float us away
on magic carpets of our choice,
fooling ourselves
into believing digital
equals connection,
leaving us emptied of warmth,
lacking touch outside
plastic shells of ourselves.
An invention to help us ignore
evidence of our dying.
What if? What if we embraced
our deaths and knew
we’d only a day left?
What would we do with a day?
Twenty-four hours?
Or an hour?
What would we all do
with only an hour left
before our inevitable death?
Sixty small minutes
marked off on an analog clock–
What would you do?
