Language and landscape change.
What we were bred to seems
immutably the same,
a timeless heritage
for us to hand down pure
as we received it.
That’s a delusion.
While we dream we’re conserving,
all the time our own
feet and hands, tongue, thoughts, thoughtlessness
are fretting, working on,
reshaping the inheritance
formed and re-formed before we were
as still it will be when we’re gone.
Decay, corruption foster life.
Even the fossil forming in the stone
helped build a shape which was not there before.
Though change offend and hurt,
immutability
would be non-entity.
Mourn the smooth hill, the woods
you love, the fitted words
you love. Love and mourn,
but the world must turn.