"The Eternal Drift"

(Washington County, PA)

 No single thing abides, but all things flow.

Fragment to fragment clings--the things thus grow

Until we know and name them.  By degrees

They melt, and are no more the things we know.

(Washington County, PA)

 Globed from the atoms falling slow or swift

I see the suns, I see the systems lift

Their forms; and even the systems and the suns

Shall go back slowly to the eternal drift.  

(Lake Ontario, NY)

 Thou too, O earth--thine empires, lands, and seas--

Least, with thy stars, of all the galaxies,

Globed from the drift like these, like these thou too

Shalt go.  Thou art going hour by hour like these.  

(Rochester, NY)

 Lo, how the terraced towers, and monstrous round

Of league-long ramparts rise from out the ground,

With gardens in the clouds.  Then all is gone,

And Babylon is a memory and a mound.

(Allegheny County, PA)

This bowl of milk, the pitch on yonder jar,

Are strange and far-bound travelers come from far;

This is a snowflake that was once a flame;

The flame was once a fragment of a star.  

(McKean County, PA)

The seeds that once were we take flight and fly,

Winnowed to earth, or whirled along the sky, 

Not lost, but disunited.  Life lives on.

It is the lives, the lives, the lives that die.

(Elk County, PA)

 They go beyond recapture and recall,

Lost in the all-indissoluble All--

Gone like the rainbow from the fountain's foam,

Gone like the spindrift shuddering down the squall.  

(McKean County, PA)

Flakes of the water, on the waters cease!  

Soul of the body, melt and sleep like these.

Atoms to atoms, weariness to rest, 

Ashes to ashes, hopes and fears to peace!

~Lucretius 
(Way, way abridged)