CYCLES

Searching, Wanting to know

C Y C L E S

I watch my children struggling with loves and life,

See them so serious dealing with happiness and strife.

It’s as if I am a prism with life shining through,

Once again, there I am dealing with life anew.

Here my darling let me show you how to avoid

The mistakes, the sorrow, so you won’t be annoyed

With life’s problems and tangles tugging at your mind.

I can speak with the voice of experience, from my life of that same kind.

 

But it seems they are not interested in my ideas and advice.

After all their lives are “special, different, unique” to be precise.

Does this sound familiar like something often said

Long ago to loving friends, to mother and dad?

What a cycle we’ve created looking forward and reverse,

An old familiar melody, same song, different verse.

I look at all men running here, limping there.

I observe each life and see joys and despair.

It seems their past and future too are but a mirror of my own,

Searching, as we do, for something perfect and unknown.

 

We are all so very special, we couldn’t possibly be the same.

How can I even imagine all lives are but the same game

Played at random with different faces and settings and skills,

Causing struggle, even wars from a clashing of wills.

I look again at the prism so clear and so bright,

Such beauty shining through, we’re all points of that same light.

Each life with its struggle with passion and death,

No recognition of who we are, a reflection at best.

 

I am startled as I see our sameness and deeply know

What I’m living is only a dream with nowhere to go.

As we strive and shop and clean for a limited time,

      I turn to the source of the prism, I search, I mime.

I meditate at length, reach out for wisdom desired,

I try to fix my children, save the world, never tire.

Then again I hear the knowing entrenched within my heart,

I’m not to judge, not to fix, only love, that’s my part.

So I’ll keep working and playing and answering the phone,

Searching as we do for something perfect and unknown.

 

        Barbara Dunton