the times of ages

*early life*
In life’s morning,
when the dawn has passed
and the world is becoming lit,
pure sense hits;
and in that brief
and feeling moment, we lift our feet and
trust to the swell and kick out
to swim

Alone and exploring,
that time came to me, like it came to you,
in the late early morning heat,
alone and free,
that knowledge came, that knowing
of who we are, and
who we are to be

*middle life*
And then,
when pregnant with middle age,
I feel my father
and his mantle
draped across my shoulders,
and seem to me
as he seemed to me,
self-pleased and satisfied, and yet
uncertain,
watching my children find their way,
sensing their belief, their
half-belief that I will always stay
mid-ocean, as
I did of my father,
feeling their feeling that
the waves of me are purposeful and untravelling,
lifting up and lifting down
through the endless passage of
bare-changing days

*end of life*
Limp, facing down,
carried by the black crows
over the rank vegetation
where snakes look skyward
along the track of a track of thorns and splinter glass
out into the plain
to the tower of silence,
to be picked clean.
And, I will feel the waves of me
hammering into the shore
and there at the edge, above some cauldron inlet,
I will see my seeing children unseeing in the mist, and some of me will linger with them
as spray and roar, as thumbling lover,
and some of me rebound
out to where the half-life roams
and the rock core sleeps.