My grandmother was born in the Victorian age,
half a United States of America ago
and an ocean of war and plunder away;
in the span of creation
less than the blink of an eyelash.
Such is living memory, expanding and contracting
with history and its unreliable narrators,
so confident in our declarations from the centre
of our own lives while galaxies spin and dance
to the song that echoes with a frequency
beyond our comprehending, sensed
only as a trembling nostalgia for the peace
that we have not yet learned to assemble.