More Wagering
The following is a guest post. Several posts have been in response to a consideration of Paschal’s Wager. Here is another:
Wager
Summer’s end, autumn waits, patient,
since the world turns inevitably, even though we claim
exemption from nature’s wheel, inventing eternities
and peopling them with souls.
Sunflowers bloom wild and silent by the stream bank,
thistles, blossoming purple, bristle among the yellows.
Children chase each other in the park where I watched
my own child squeal and tumble laughing, as my mother
watched me in another park long ago, as my child will
watch his own one day somewhere far away.
Clouds gloom and gather, darkening the sky.
How long before winds and thunder follow? Does it matter?
I pray for the dead, – my form of Pascal’s wager –
gambling that the dearly departed have indeed departed,
not merely decomposed to dust and ash. I string words together,
inventing eternities of my own.
If the dead are now nothing, then my words will fix some fragments
into memory. That’s all we may have. A passing nod, an errant flicker.
Someone should remember. So much joy. So much pain.
Each individual struggle. Someone should remember.
Raggedy thistles, well-ordered sunflowers, perennial,
but not eternal, do not recall ancestral roots nor mourn
last season’s antecedent blooms.
Our consciousness creates the faces we search
in the mirror for answers beyond the simple fact
of being. Answers that will lay our griefs to rest and grant
untroubled faith in lieu of knowledge.
But there is no Eden, no unquestioning bliss,
however much we shout hosannas and
drone our prayers. We’re on our own,
as we have ever been. Partially tied
to nature’s turning, but separate as we cherish
each solitary blossom, in every season,
and mourn the withering of a single bloom
even though another one unfurls.
Still working on it, M.V. Abricka, 10/14/15
