The Lamp of Memory

--Joshua Edwards

The writer looks back, year

by year, star after star, ever

and anon. "I came out singing,

sailing, and gliding on beauty."

The writer remembers

the river, hills, and flowers.

"I lived like a landscape with

a large glaciar in its midst."

Let us imagine him in stone,

devoted to a life of posterity

and the idea of the future,

Watching the passing waves

of humanity, outlasting the world.

"I believe in objects more

than subjects. Art is the failure

of the subject. Objects are true."

His mind becomes itself a subject,

subordinate to a twisted sense

of historical proportion, clinging

to sublimity and preservation.

"I think of my life as a skeleton

and modern times as a funeral.

I belong to the future, like a green

sea, like the sun, like the sky."