Leisure - W.H. Davies

This poem spoke to me. Always moving so fast and worrying about everything. It’s okay to slow it down once and a while and actually enjoy this life we’ve been given. 

WHAT is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?—

No time to stand beneath the boughs,
And stare as long as sheep and cows:

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass:

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night:

No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance:

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began?

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

The Light: A Diary Entry From the Future.

It was darker than usual today, the children aren’t used to the power outages like other people are. They don’t happen often but when they do it’s a shock to the young ones. There is no more light anymore, no more real light that is. Only artificial light…replicated light. For the children it’s all they know, so when the generators cut out it scares them. For us, it’s just like flipping a living room light switch on and off…what it used to be like anyway. Times have changed, the world is a different place now. We look at photos of the earth and how beautiful it used to be and we can’t imagine why anyone would have destroyed such a beautiful gift, but everyone says not to think about the past anymore, we have to move forward. It’s hard though, moving forward. When we don’t know where we’re going, or why, or how, or for what reasons. People always tell us that things are more complicated then they seem, which always bewildered me, I don’t understand how complicated it is to take care of our home. To me the choice seems simple, but somehow it seems the world as a whole manages to choose money over water, business over nature and self over others. When I was a little boy I was told it was my generations job to change the world, maybe they told us that because they knew things were beyond repair, that the system was so far into the ground that no one could change it. When I was young I was told that we wanted to save our planet, protect it from harm, so that our children could have a life better than our own. It seems we’ve failed. I wonder how long it will take us to realize that the choices are not complicated, that we make the rules…and we can change them. If you’re reading this in the future, I hope you can take from it what is needed…a very simple, very unavoidable message.

-Victor Maltor, 2320