CREATORS IN THE LONG NOW

Do you hear tick tock? The sound of the long clock.
It has long hands. One moves a bit each spring.
When young and torn with anger we arrange
Against it generations, all our things.

We trace lines in the sand, and learn to speak.
The thing we call now lengthens. Next year's soon.
We say it all in steel, then DNA and fire.
We write it down in sunlit October afternoon.

We know too much of dreams -- still there is waking.
So many times and turns before we die.
I draw the lines in blood. They are worth making.
A box with no lid, open to the sky.


















While I like poems to stand on their own, there's no way you can understand that last line and stanza without knowing that I'm donating my eggs to some gay friends, twice to the same couple. Each daddy will have one child combining his DNA with mine; so the children will be related through me. That family's diagram of genetic resemblance (bloodlines, get it?) will make a quite beautiful shape as referred to above.
Intriguingly, this same shape shows up quite often as a diagram in advanced applied mathematics (analysis of trusses, Kalman filters, and various other matrixy things), so I encountered it many times as a grad student. I liked it back then, too.

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