Where the First Shall Be Last.

Adam and Eve must have thought they were the first,

Drunk on love, gamboling about the garden of Eden

Like two ecstatic children - the first to know passion,

The first to know the terrible cost of paradise lost.

Isaac Newton must have enjoyed this feeling,

That falling apple, apocryphal or not, having stunned

His mind with the gift of an invisible force

Guiding celestial bodies in their dance around the sun.

Amelia Earhart must have savoured this thrill,

Watching the Atlantic slide below like an endless

Rippling conveyor belt pulling her through the sky

Toward a destiny with a ghostly testimony.

Neil Armstrong, too, must have caught that wave,

Like the creator marveling at his creation,

Seeing the whole earth poised in blackness so complete

That stepping off his tiny ship felt like a giant leap.

But who confers upon whom the status of "being first"?

Is it history or our own thirst for originary myths?

We need beginnings. Beginnings need protagonists,

Actions, words, or they remain vague, out of reach,

Like false memories, illusions, fevered dreams.

Is it our attempt to capture a unique subjectivity,

To be a rock in the fast flowing river of time,

Where the first is always and already the last:

The last to see a new world diminished,

The last to look on power with innocence,

The last to seek knowledge without limits,

The last to live in bliss without ignorance?

© shaun patrick green 2018