Jonathan Livingston Seagull

“They are saying in the Flock that if you are not the Son of the Great Gull Himself”, Fletcher told Jonathan one morning after Advanced Speed Practice, “then you are a thousand years ahead of your time.”
Jonathan sighed. The price of being misunderstood he thought. They call you devil or they call you god. “What do you think, Fletch? Are we ahead of our time?”
A long silence, “Well, this kind of flying has always been here to be learned by anyone who wanted to discover it; that’s got nothing to do with time. We’re ahead of the fashion, maybe. Ahead of the way that most gulls fly.”“That’s something,” Jonathan said, rolling to glide inverted for a while. “That’s not half as bad as being ahead of our time”.
Richard Bach
Jonathan Livingston Seagull

The Seagull Speaks Creative Commons Copyright

Monday, January 6, 2014

The Ragged Bone Man

The ragged bone man comes,
And ragged does he stare,
On faces black and bleak,
With sweat and pain and tears.

We run to meet him,
Smiling, blank, and cry,
Forever,
His memories haunt,
His eyes,
Are dark and deepened pools of blank,
In which we swim.

Together,
He leaves and loves,
Or does he?
To wave us, "Goodbye".

Or beckon us, "Come!",
To his land,
Where the ragged, bony, scragged men
Lie bedraggled and broken black,
In ditches.

And dear old time wastes us,
Ragged, scragged, black.

He knocks patiently,
Until we leave,
With him,
Alone.

This poem is an old one written sometime 1986-1990