Persistence and Change

This poem developed in the fall of 2004, a Presidential election year, and one during which the United States was, indeed, at war:

Persistence
...there is nothing new under the sun.
I have seen all the things that are done under the sun;
all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
Ecclesiastes 1:9b, 14 (NIV)

Seasons have turned again. Shiny
wild grasses wave free as flags
and proud as the banners of war.

Multi-flora rose canes, thorny terrorists,
grab and gouge the unwary, the greedy
roots tunnel deep, spread, cleave, hide

in earthy parts that would rather cling
together. See the constant river, corduroy
pattern subtly changed from yesterday.

Wind stings my cheeks. My sweatshirt
hood, black, comes forward like blinders.

I stand under the sun, stare at the world, wait
for any thing to unfold for me today.

On the huge, ancient, reliable rock—
the one rising from the water, shaped like an icon
of the turtle that carries the globe on its back—
shadows hint of growing fissures.

I may live to see it split as a family divided
in one wild moment, edges sharp and bitter
for decades but gradually wearing away,
the breaking pain buffed and smoothed

into pebbles and grains of sand laid down
side by side, one with another, like all
that has gone before, the floor beneath
the flow, the ever shifting ripples.
~Carol Bindel~

Now, in the spring seven years later, I continue to observe that ancient, reliable rock. For a few years after I wrote the above poem, fierce and also slow currents did continue to undercut that turtle rock, wearing it away, making the image of the shell with an opening for the turtle body even more real. About three years ago, though, a large tree fell just upstream, roots and all, and was washed downstream to where it came to rest in such a way that much of the water flow was diverted away from that rock. Pebbles and sand piled up in the lee. By last summer it looked to me as if a new island might be forming, that rock a sturdy, part-buried element included.

Now, in the floods a couple weeks ago, the tree and the collected pebbles and sands all washed away. The tree, I believe, was diverted by the power of high water from the right bank where it had been shielding the big rock, to where it now rests high on the left bank, the Y of its trunk collapsed, yet the roots and color still identifiable. The pebbles and sand surely lie redistributed, unidentifiable. The notion of a new island, of growth, of a family newly and strongly growing in unity without first a break from the old, all that now again looks unlikely.

Yet the metaphor continues to feel sturdy to me. We cannot know, day to day, cannot predict exactly what event comes next. All we can know with surety is that change will continue and continue, and we can rest in the comfort of knowing that life is change. I rest assured that life and change and flow will carry us all.