How often we ponder traveling time
To alter the past or leave it untouched,
Emending eventual evils and crimes
Or contriving futures we yearn to clutch.
The notion is but an idle game,
An engaging diversion of no import.
It presumes there is but one shared frame:
Just a wrinkle here, and the quilt distorts.
Yet time and space are boundless realms,
And countless worlds beyond our own
Stay shrouded, lest our senses overwhelm;
They contain within all events unshown.
Your possible pasts: already transpired.
Conceivable fortunes will each come to be.
We live but a sliver and miss the entire,
Where all is achieved, and all is destiny.
Say, in this world they meet and share their bliss,
And so your birth was foreordained.
But in that one the war denies their kiss;
Still here you nevertheless remain.
In one sphere Adonis withholds his spear.
In another, Deirdre and Naoise delay.
And here, a night when ill waters run clear.
And there, a crypt where dagger is stayed.
Your one true love you may never find—
You arrived too early, or decades too late.
Impediments common but no less unkind—
Still somewhere the weavers did tangle your fates.
Together those two have ever been;
United this pair will ever be.
For the plane exists they love within,
No less the real though we cannot see.
And as one world collapses, ’tis quickly reborn.
Eternal recurrence: doomed to replay
Our sorrows, our pains, the losses we mourn;
So too the joys, the wonders, for always.
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