JANUARY 3, 2000
It is a strange date I write.
Three days into the new millennium.
A thousand years,
birthdays,
new cities,
settling scores.
Is it like a thousand miles?
A thousand friends,
a thousand leagues into the sea,
into the heavens?
Am I a child of such a vision?
Barely able to find my shoes in the morning,
squinting at the dust
left by stars and moonlight,
but to contemplate this new quest,
this huge dimension,
this vault higher than my life,
vaster than my dreams.
I huddle in the covers of a gone century,
seeing what we’ve done,
so I only ask one thing of our new destiny.
One prayer,
one hope as I turn the new calendar,
make notes on its pages.
In these last days of our 19th century,
we opened Pandora’s Box,
and each new box beget another,
and we opened them all,
hundreds I think,
perhaps a thousand,
one for each year of the bygone age.
Can we in the next thousand years
close them all,
nail them down,
pretend we never peeked,
until such time
we learn to deal with our greatest gift,
folly?