Passing Through

A hard time I had of it:  
travelled a slow thousand metres  
on the old rowing machine,  
a sharp daily wake-up before breakfast  
melting away bleary-eyed dreams  
straining the view West  
to a sunlit village in the distance  
with a river of mist above the Mondego valley.  
  
A beautiful bird glided past the window  
as the last star faded into new light  
showing me a way beyond folly;  
and I’m glad it did.  
Unencumbered by retrospective shame or guilt  
though perhaps sensing an underlying whisper of fear  
having escaped several times an early death  
from the ever-prowling cat,  
it flew free of accusatory names, labels, suppositions  
past the palm tree  
and landed on the Albizia  
joining with others for a morning chorus.  
   
The garden oasis Nature created  
with a little additional human sweat,  
grows on an original rocky terrain with a long history,  
revealed after an unoriginal pile of rubble    
left by messy builders was first cleaned up;  
deep holes dug with a jack-hammer  
provide special bell-pits filled with rich soil  
for each and every bush, flower and tree planted.  
But clock this:  
when the bird finally dies  
and I too cease my regular visitations  
leaving this world to its evolutionary ambitions,  
the patch of land will continue to bring forth fruit  
filled with valuable memories of conscious beings  
who, once upon a time, made their contribution  
passing through.  
   
   
   
#T.S.Eliot