11 PM, December 31, 2020
by Dr. Lloyd Jacobs
Image source: Unsplash
It’s the way things go on, virus
or no virus; it is only reasonable to think
the world tomorrow will be something like
that of today and yesterday,
A world stitched together
by gravity and van der Waal’s forces.
There will be places filling space
and there will be time.
Places we can name: like Johnstown
or Johannesburg, like San Diego or Ammon
or Hiroshima, places we can go to
and places we can be.
There will be time, parsed into aliquots
of Bergsonian duration, warmth and cold
and twenty-four hour cycles of light
for work and darkness for love.
Time like wire drawn from ductile steel,
through the sharp aperture of today
from the infinite store of tomorrows
becomes the yesterdays of memory.
Or should I not be here to see with eyes
of Kantian mind, will there be springing
kine and birds and green meadow flowers;
will every sun gutter and die?
Or if our sustainer God is finally poured out,
exhausted and dying or already dead
how will there be anything at all,
how something instead of nothing?
Dr. Lloyd Jacobs is a retired vascular surgeon and President Emeritus of the University of Toledo. He is the author of two books of poetry: Before I Forget and 80 Poems.