No Future In The Past Poem by Denis Martindale

No Future In The Past



It is difficult to avoid the past,
whether waking or sleeping,
for we recall the places visited,
the sweethearts loved and lost...

Without some ruthless control,
each memory swirls within,
to course through our veins,
quickening the human heart,
releasing a faster-paced thrill,
that thunder, that adrenaline,
that present purpose to explore...

Then to savour and to milk the feelings,
to stroke them into greater power,
to make them obey the fantasy
that evolves from pleasures known.

To change the names, the faces, the places,
the course of events unfolding,
striving and driving new hopes, new dreams,
perchance to cultivate a more perfect love,
to fix what the past has left unfixed,
to transcend both time and space,
to set in motion a better more precious plan,
a greater future, where love has dominion
and all is well and not as it once was
and could and would and should have been...

It is Man's destiny to prevail against the odds,
to compel him towards the abyss,
to look over and face it without fear,
to embrace death like an old friend,
seeing it as but the portal to a better world.

And if Man is meant for higher purpose,
then even love becomes the slave of destiny,
even the fantasies of a more perfect love,
for this Earth is not all there is or was,
nor is it all that God meant us to know...

So the past is not the guide to all things known,
nor the ruler of the human heart or soul,
nor the taskmaster of the human body,
nor of life and limb, nor of the hopes and dreams.
Such authority is reserved to God Almighty
and He will never let that authority go...
and rightly so, for all Creation is His
and His for evermore...


Denis Martindale, copyright, November 2013.

READ THIS POEM IN OTHER LANGUAGES
Close
Error Success