Song of Two Worlds

by Alan Lightman

  When the father returns to his country,

  Or boys who collect the tin cans on the street,

  Or the bank tellers sorting the coins and the bills,

  Or the soldiers who crawl through the sludge

  With cocked guns,

  Or the writers of letters that wait in locked drawers,

  Or the lawyers and pilots and teachers and dragglers—

  There’s no completion in patterns,

  For patterns are constantly restitched in new patterns.

  There’s no completion in history, which kneels

  Bare and mute at the feet of the future.

  There’s no completion in mind

  With its unending halls,

  Or electronic minds that have no beliefs.

  There’s no completion in seasons, repeating repeating,

  Or Earth as its spin traces loops through the stars,

  Or the Sun as it slowly consumes itself, fire on fire,

  Or Space as it twists and expands in the dark—

  Or the pitiless ticking of clocks,

  Or the withering of snapdragons after their seeds,

  Or my crippled dear Abbas bent over his cane,

  Or the hand as it cleanses the wound,

  Or the kiss that brings life to life,

  And then later to nothingness.

  There’s no completion in nothingness.

  99

  Where can I sit on this trifle of dirt

  That revolves without aim in the blackness

  Of space? If I ask, will the asking,

  Unanswered, come round on itself—

  Even in emptiness make a thing whole?

  My companions are gone—Newton and Darwin,

  Lao-Tzu, Omar Khayyam.

  My mother and uncle, my lost wife and children,

  Abbas and his daughters and sons—

  Whom can I love who will not pass to nothing,

  When all pass to nothing, along with this song?

  Is there nothing and nothing,

  A drivel from dry sea beds

  As time slides to an end?

  It cannot be so.

  I must reach out to what I’m unable to grasp,

  Reach out to what I want to believe,

  And my mutterings slip from my lips,

  Faintly, and faintly dissolve in the air,

  And my small room is soundless again.