After Visiting the Museum

One little life, such a tiny swish
in the stretch of swinging stars.
But here’s a spoon that’s made of bone,
crafted by a woman—
a tool she never could imagine
I would peer at now—
2500 years in the past,
whose life was all the endless time she knew.

I wonder what might be displayed
2500 years ahead
to demonstrate our days?
Not a spoon or cooking pot, not a painted vase.
Little that we use is crafted
by hand or even made to last.
Is it plastic we’ll be known for? Guns?
Remembered with incredulous compassion?

If the future for humans exists,
I think the label for our period,
must say our daily objects
are from The Turning Time,
when a tsunami of creative solutions
swept man-made destruction clean.
A single life, such a tiny swish
in the stretch of swinging stars.

But at such a junction, individual lives
multiply their consequence.
What’s salvaged from now will never fit
in any museum the future devises.
If the future for humans exists,
what’s preserved will be imagination,
the invisible gift we stretched
to save the planet and ourselves.

I say to my descendants
twenty-five hundred years from now,
We found the pliancy within,
discovered that a little life, that tiny swish
in the stretch of swinging stars,
is bigger and smaller than we supposed.
For your museum in the distant future,
dear descendants, take my little poem.

Picture in your mind,
as I have pictured the one who made the spoon,
the crafter of this poem.
Take the making from my hands and heart,
take these words you still can hear me speak.
and know that it’s for you and yours,
that we now in the Turning Time
are transforming all our ways.

©Susa Silvermarie 2019