573, 578, and 581

The Holodeck! Where “neverything” can be!

Where Neverland can grow to Neverworld!

How much you promise, how much we can see—

Pandora’s cornucopia uncurled!

We’ll have a good old time within your walls,

with revelry that never needs to end!

We’ll wander in yet unimagined halls

to find—we know not what—behind each bend!

We’ll find, at last, all that there is of naught.

For what you offer is not what we want.

We want—but have already what you’ve got,

albeit that the real thing can be gaunt.

You save us from the rough road we must take

to find it, but yours always will be fake.

~~~

A weekend without writing—what a waste!

But why want words on a weekend as this?

Has handiwork of handwriting the haste

to win over the words of wilderness?

For this was such a weekend: full of trees

and coastlines, both by spectral scape mist kissed;

and all the writing of those trees and seas

made up for all the writing that I missed.

I’ll write now from the bounties of the books

that bold adventure filled in a few days;

and I’ll take years to write what a few brooks

have said, and what their echoing still says.

But I, the conscious man, record one word

of what still waits within the wild, unheard.

~~~

Hope is not last to die, tho I am loath

to argue with the wise ones who say so;

but Love will last a thousand years, and clothe

the Hopeless soul with life, however slow.

For Hope is that which quickens life, but can’t

produce it, nor prolong it. It is Love

that feeds the never-dying dismal plant

when Hopeful soil can’t be spoken of.

I live because there are those that I Love,

not that I Hope to reap the Love I keep.

The Hope for that is in a world above,

but I stay here and leave dead Hope asleep.

I could awaken it at any time,

but Love wills me live, and still to pine.