(first appeared in “The Lyric”, Volume 73, No.1  – Winter 1993)

Poor me, we cry, then wash our hands;
this world of ours makes such demands
and no one knows just where we stand
and so we stand for nothing.

For now we hold, as science shows:
that nothing is and no one knows.
Our course is cast upon the flows
of, from, and back to nothing.

We build our castles by the sea
and conscious of the irony,
ignore the tides of destiny
as if we thought them nothing.