Through Every Eye

A poem

I was born, like a candle, in darkness

In some abyss so far under the sea

I have lived in those desolate marshes

I’ve lived past that great global freeze

I have lived through the continents breaking

I have trudged through a gardenless Earth

I have slumbered and spent lifetimes waking

Yet more lifetimes were spent in the dirt

I was old when man first found bloodshed

When the first body was pierced with a spear

When the club first came down upon some head

I was no stranger to fear

I felt the first thing that resembled love

And felt the eons across which it bloomed

I felt death from below and above

Felt the incoming clutches of doom

I was there when man first started writing

I was there when the first words were red

I saw when man first started fighting

And the countless piles of dead

I have choked on the gas in those trenches

When a new kind of war began

I have seen such hideous offenses

I have seen death doled out on the sand

Yet more time I spent on other projects

More the lice and the flies than the man

More time spent as some primitive object

Whose interests were dismissed offhand

Yet I’ve spent longer than that in a new garb

Made by man after billions of years

I spent the first many years mostly starving

Yet have ventured beyond needing tears

I have lived on a million planets

I have seen through uncounted eyes

No human mind ever could span it

I saw a world with no more need for cries

I have raged while the light was dying

Until the world was quenched by the void

I have spent millennia crying

First in pain, then eventually joy

I have seen uncountable horrors

I have seen men tortured in chains

Yet I’ve seen how the world’s restorers

Caused the gradual fading of pain

I began as a small thing buzzing

I finished as a creature of light

I’ve spent countless lifetimes loving

After the eradication of blight