Millennium

Two thousand years have passed tonight
Since we know not what happened -
But Bede and the years determined that God's son
Must have his day
And that day must need a year
So that men could measure modern time
And reassure themselves that things, since then,
Had changed for the better.

We might measure time in other ways
By season, day or night
Time between floods or phases of the moon
By earthquake, famine or drought.
We might mark lifetimes, of the great and monumental
And the small insignificant ones
Whose purpose was to swell the masses
To do as they were bid, too ignoble to be sacrificed,
To fuck in the dirt and die of the plague.

Recognising our need to establish our own significance
In carving out the tombstones of others;
Wondering how we'll die - swift and surprising,
Slow and lingering, plucked away in the full flow
Of achievement without hubris
Or innocently charged to experience all the tiniest
Terrors of interminable wracking pain
Before we have known pleasure;
We might choose not to measure it at all
But feel time's passing through us like a ghost
Leaving but the slightest chill of loss.

We do not know what the future holds.
Science, astrology, divinity
All boil down to an act of faith
And an act of faith is an act of love.
Love stops time, stills the spinning
Of the earth
Lifts us beyond what we perceive and joins us
To the timeless and eternal.
Through passionate bodies love frees us from
Their constraining clay.
Love steals our selves
And makes us Gods.

Timeless moments
May occur in insignificant places.
What might otherwise be a Waterloo or a Calgary
An Eden or Arcadia?
A night of frosty stars
A fluttering of snow
A quickening of hearts
And a kiss that brought together two souls beyond time
On a bleak and soulless street
Made us who we are
And made that blank street blessed.

It could have happened years before.
What pains did we endure, what shadows clasp as love
Before chance and yearning brought us to that star-chilled street
And a new vision with a new year's dawning?
What bodies mistakenly embrace and cry for
As we sought each other
Unknowing as we sat across a table
Or built lives an ocean apart?
Until with a benighted kiss
We came together, we came home.

That kiss was not the first one we had shared.
It took the breath, unusual,
So soft and so electrifying
So perfect and yet so familiar
A memory stirred within me of something lost
Of something I had thought I dreamed and now could recognise
Remembered.

What and who were we when first we kissed
And in how many lifetimes?
Did we struggle to find language when wintry cave-bound
We held each other in flinty arms and were warm?
Did treasures tumble from coruscating chests of gold
Beneath our besceptered bed?
Did we bestride the icy bow of doomed Titanic
Or did you tend my bloodied brow
As martial breath expiring whispered
"Kiss me"?

It matters not.
Love is not marked by millennia,
By marriage or affair or what the law lays down
By foolish sacrifice or flamboyant expense,
By monument or progeny.
It knows not bodies and their boundaries
Scorns their limits and their lusts
Their feebleness and frailties.
Love returns eternally to its home
And will return again until
Mortality ends and seeking stops
And love is love and only love.
These bodies are our present home and will crumble away
But we who love now and have loved before will love again
And love forever
In love's eternal return.

This millennium we see is one of many we have seen
And yet again will see
Through these eyes of love.
Tonight we'll mark not its passing, not the world's progression;
Not the trembling anticipation of the future;
Not the knowing awe of science of what species we may become
Or what may dancing or slouching follow
But with a kiss
Mark love's eternal coming home.