I needed to call across time while musicians played a haunting cry on thin wooden pipes, whistling hollow notes that beckoned lost love like forlorn hearts, chiming echoes.
“Seeker can you hear me?”
The musicians were unseen. The tune not echoed across a gulf I could not bridge another way. Reaching out to touch someone so far through time and place as to make it nearly impossible to recall how they, looked the sound of their laughter as their eyes glowed with joy’s remembrance.
A subterranean reverberation of drums vibrated the atmosphere as if to summon absent souls. Ice tumbled the face of mountains, falling to collect in a pool where the sun would melt it, and like the blood of those wounded in war’s battles, the liquid seeps into the single entity of its beginning.
That’s what we were given; that’s what we lost.
I helplessly watched as you bled. Your life flowed and collected around the seat of your spirit while you shivered as if longing to die. However living is too strong and your power too much interlocked with mine for either of us to flee this Earth before our tasks are completed.
“Seeker can you hear me?”
Crickets stirred as they brushed through dew-laden grass. It was too soon to mow, too late to harvest. Their eerie song evoked confusion, but within their message lay the answer we sought. Listen to them dance with nature’s cymbals entwining their limbs, chirping each step, each heartbeat. The crickets spoke softly to us to stop hiding and continue the quest.
They told stories written but forgotten in archives tucked beneath stones along the stream that fed the Pool of Life. Stories once recited by the Giver of Knowledge as the tree bore fruit offered to the Creator in thanks for the opportunity to live and prosper with the grace of bountiful sustenance.
Stories of battles won and lost lives forfeit for the sake of the quest without the knowledge that the true quest was preservation of life. Stories about warriors seeking as they, struggled against foes uninvited and therefore unintended.
However cold rain persisted. The crickets fled their songs muffled and then forgotten. The pipers resumed their hollow whispered call into the wilderness of lost time and love.
One man crawled across the wet slippery surface at the summit having climbed to become what a man must be in his lifetime, and learned then that a man would, not have to prove himself a man if he were to become one.
Rain carried him down the mountain as if now discarding the remnants of the unnecessary and dropped him in the Pool of Life.
There the man found his purpose.
Then the rain pelted all living things killing some with the fruits of salvation while others were nurtured from the same abundance.
Bodies drifted along unnatural streams gouged into the Earth to flush the ruined dreams of Seekers who had given up their quest before reaching their goals; given up when a lifetime’s completion remained only a heartbeat’s distance. A single step a small caress a smile or hand held out in kindness.
It is easy to quit, but difficult to succeed.
Small bodies lie in the sun
I looked to be certain I wasn’t one
the soldier standing holding a gun
he was the person who might have won.
Footsteps rustled leaves even though wet
and life moved forward without regret.
We’re taught stories a fragmented vignette
of hollow tales and another’s need to forget.
Standing I knew I must move away
the soldier had lowered his gun to pray
the bullet he fired tumbled the day
turning light into words he dared not say.
I could watch and see his sorrow and tears
his shoulders shuddered under so many years
and while his features blurred with the cheers
the crowd walked away and like me disappeared.
Time dances with our lives and taunted us to challenge it with deeds. However, those tasks set by others were never to be completed. It is within our grasp to control the flow of time by calculating the emanation of our thoughts. Chaos ruled only within the context of undisciplined attitude, flowing into mountainous drifts, crossing the paths we selected as our own. A stiff current of unexpected events life’s promised fulfillment churned a heartbeat into arrhythmic palpitation that drew breath from a floundering body.
But a spirit at peace is a calming influence on all it embraced, on all it touched, and on all who ask, “Is this the way we should walk this path?”
“Seeker, can you hear me now?”
Copyright 2018 Gabriel FW Koch all rights reserved.