Pour The Ocean Into a Cup

Tonight the air is thick

With every life ever lived, slick

With the beating of hearts

And the weight of Our story.

 

I try to fathom the number,

The sheer scale, the thunder

Of Our endless histories,

All Our lives and loves.

 

I try to feel every feeling,

Every emotion and its meaning;

Rattle through all the names,

Love, joy, pain, loss and on and on.

 

But they fall away like sand,

Slipping through my hands;

Like trying to pour the ocean,

Into a cup.

 

My heart, my soul, my brain

Cannot begin to even contain,

Can hardly comprehend,

The enormity of all of Us.

 

How do we grasp mankind

With just a human mind?

I can barely bear the weight

Of my own twenty two years.

 

I can no longer feel every moment,

Every thought, every sentiment

Of my decade and two;

It is lost, hanging in the air.

 

So tonight I think of lost stories,

The airborne memories;

Humanity’s biography of itself

Is air, thick with life.