Day Twenty-Nine: A Poem for a Village called Nacton

This world is a beautiful place, and despite all the problems, life is grand. There is no world like this, 

where the sheep are lovely and lonely, and the hills roll endlessly and end abruptly at the granite sea-beach. The pebbles are un-alike: there is not one that is the same as another, and yet they are all pebbles. The people are un-alike: there is not one that is the same as the other, and yet they are all people. 

Time passes with every moment, 

even in the moments when we aren't awake to watch it go. 

It sets itself to the clock on the wall, 

and the wall was built by human hands and so was the clock, 

and yet time is an abstract noun 

that passed before man claimed it. 

The sunflowers are yellow here, 

in this little village of the world. 

They sit and bob, and they bobbed and sat 

and waved to me as I walked by. They knew 

I was coming, to this little world. 

Those two ones in full ball-dress were ready for me, 

ready to take my soul and dance with it 

when I fall asleep tonight. 

Then the lavender in my room will strike up a tune, 

whistling fresh-scented air through its dangling bells. 

The moon will hum like a motor boat zooming 

across the horizon of a lake, so far away

that it seems not to move at all, and yet 

so close that you know it for what it is. 

I will visit the waves in slow-motion and dive

into the yellow grains that crown her shores,

a flower crown without the flowers, 

yet she is beautiful.

That is the beauty of this world: this village is small and unobtrusive,

it is not particularly particular or spectacularly spectacular

and yet it is beautiful.

It is the queen of its world, and that is all the world, because the world is no world without each baby world which makes it whole.

Remember that, 

young seedling tree,

young teething babe,

young wobbling bud:

you must be as proud as if you were the whole world,

because you are -

to someone, somewhere,

you are.

One day one soul will dance with you, for a moment,

for a moment that stretches to the end of time 

and back,

for a moment that swirls around the milky way and deep inside the blackest hole

and back,

for a moment that is beautiful because it is.

Do not be so busy seeking the right moment that you miss the one on the left.