Dark sites/sights

Time is blue, time is snow.

Wall map of England, yellow and time..

Time so yellow that none can tell it,

a black index finger...

---Gunter Eich.

~

The kids were laughing, making each other laugh, with the clarity and innocence of a ringing bell. You stop and marvel at such moments, brief though they are. A wise man or woman, you think, must laugh each day-not at themselves or their own or other people's lives but..

That laughter, the 'smile of reason' are intangible and fleeting things, never to be captured by the sciences or any form of analysis. For all the power and strength of systems on one side and still something will remain, undiminished, still something will be kindled with the birth of each new child.

The thin glimmer down here

isn't light from church or factory

wasn't the striking of a match.

--Montale (garbled)

Everything but the face of the Lord perishes. It is at times like this that it seems that time is a shadow gliding over a map...the dark site of the heart briefly illuminated, our face for the world to see, the brightness of laughter both ancient and new, and then the mystery of the surrounding silence.