Ghosts’ Own Memoirs

History could crush you in an instant.
Still, events happen too slowly to be
Comprehended by the longest lifespan.

Science is prophecy for atheists.
Unfortunately for theists, it works
More often than any faith-based vision,

And if probability is the best
Perspective you can ever hope to have,
There’s no chance of final comprehension.

That doesn’t stop prophets from explaining
How supernatural certainty awaits
Anyone willing to take them on faith.

Caught between the slow arc of the cosmos
And the promise of sudden extinction,
Their foolishness is awfully tempting.

The one perspective needed is missing,
The retrospection of the ancient dead—
Not words preserved from when they were living

And subject to the same short-sightedness
Every embodied awareness suffers,
But the full-length memoirs of ghosts as ghosts.

If languages themselves, having persisted
Through so many short-lived incarnations,
Gesturing, echoing, and slithering

Among the generations of fresh skulls,
Had managed to retain more memory
Than mere trivial etymologies,

They could have constructed a narrative
That transcended life’s sequence of fragments.
But no, cultures are like bodies like that—

Just multicellular organisms
Compounded of masses of little lives,
Every one with its own walls, its own chance

To turn cancerous, the whole assemblage
Redundant from its core to its borders,
Self-bounded units, again and again.