Much More Was Lost

In gleaming morning sun we ran
Each day the day it all began
A flare was lit between the worlds we wandered
We bounded over broken log
Across the steppe, beyond the fog
To life in tiny fragments all felt bonded.

By chance one noon we saw someone
Our words reached out they heard us come
But when eyes met, we glimpsed their hopeless sadness
We asked but found we could not fathom
What had sewn their sorrowed pattern
So we fled that lake and all its madness.

But still we knew that life was good
And through that scare, our joy withstood
We found new thrills to chase and thoughts to wonder
Our days unfurled with troubles not
Through thistles kicked and thorns forgot
'Til one day something new would drag us under.

In dappled light that time we roamed
On higher land, our senses honed
A place so cold and new we had discovered
But then we saw we weren't the first
A dreamer lay there, frozen, cursed
Much more was lost than ever was recovered.

We ran, but this time with no joy
Each stumble shaping man from boy
A truth wept through from just behind life's curtain
What drove them to that lonely end?
Is this the wound no one can mend?
A bleeding out of all that had been certain.

Still others since have crossed our path
That man of buried aftermath
And she who seemed to wait and hide forever
So many moments came and went
Yet none were kept, as dreams were spent
And in this way old truths emerged together.

Still others since have crossed our path
That man of buried aftermath
And she who seemed to wait and hide forever
So many moments came and went
Yet none were kept, as dreams were spent
And in this way old truths emerged together.

We can recall, I think, a time
When footholds held and stories rhymed
And now we see that those we met were grasping.

We know that they had felt it too
Until it left them, as they grew
To leave them looking back at us for asking.

Those elders smiled through gritted jaw
A deluge held, but held no more
And as it broke, it brought new kinds of knowing
Return the mind to where it was
We try, but it won't go, because
That mind has gone, and with it went a-glowing.