Circles and Spheres


Linearity is an illusion.
All movement is a circle;
being knowing having doing
rhythmic rocking
in the echo
of our mother's steady heart-beat,
marker of her circulation,
of the blood returning, moving
through her heart and then through ours.

The first flickers of awareness
spark surrounded by her uterus.
That sphere lives with us always,
the foundation of our memories
though we forget so easily
our love of rounded things.

Later, moving through the seasons
as the world turns round beneath us
with the music of the spheres
ringing silent in our ears,
when we've finished with our tenure
dust to dust and ash to ashes
we submit our final chapter
to the earth, our mother's mother;
soon our atoms will return
in the body of another.

Breath to bone, life to death -
earth whirls onward through the spheres
which in turn themselves are turning;
no one of these will trouble to sit still.

Eternity is circles within circles -
all things move in one eternal circle;
linearity is an illusion.


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