Days passed.
Chasing the peaceful nights,
Days passed.

These short measures of time,
Signified by light and by dark,
Or by sun and by moon,
Chased each other onward:
Night chasing day
Chasing night,
And then day.
And again.

What mournful recollections
When only night and day
Are significant of time
Passed.

What boredom, more
Than boredom;
Despondent in all but a heartbeat.

Why did the heart keep beating?

No more than night or day
Or beating heart
Had purpose.
And in that,
No more purpose than dividing

Time,
The torturer of mind,
The tester of truth
And the jester of life.

Such was that time.
It was a hard time,
Food had no meaning
In that desolate heat;
To eat was to sustain a
Heart that never should have beat
Again.

Such were the thoughts then.

Sight melted into fantasy
And terror,
Surmising the possibility
Of a better life,
And of better deaths in
That desolate heat.

That desert heat left
Water more valuable
Than all the gold
That in fantasies
The sands were made of.

Ah! A desert of sand of gold!
So beautiful!

No! No beauty in a desert:
Only in water;
But no!
And even then
Only beauty in Death.

So the mind wandered,
Observing the days
Chase the nights.

Sleepless nights.
Why waste time in sleep
When there is a sure death
Waiting?
Why mimic the inevitable?

Yet, how not to sleep?
To let time pass without
Notice of a day or a night.

But in sleep death is mimicked.
Questions raised
Torment through sleepless
Nights and fantastic days.
Shall the awakening from Death
Bring another day
As the awakening from a night
Brings another day,
And with it the agony of
That day, then the night
Chasing the day,
And again?

Or does this death become
The death of nights
And days,
The death of time only
But not of the body?

It is intrinsic in being
That existence involves
The occupation of time,
And of space,
And that being connotes
An awareness of that time
And that space and
The relationship to them
Possessed by that which
Exists and which has being.

What then does a death
Take away?
This desolate heat
In this desert space
At this despondant time?
The weary body?
The awareness of
Of time and space?

Or just a heartbeat.

Or just a dream of gold laden sands,
Sifting through the hands,
And women in raiment of satin
Bearing jugs of water for
An insatiable thirst
For gold?
For water?

That death awaits.

The inevitable conclusion
Or the indecisive beginning.
That death which would
Take away this heat,
This desert,
This nothingness,
To put nothing in
Its place.

But should a death come,
Who to experience the
Night and the day
Chasing nights?
Who to feel the
Meaningless hunger?

What heart to beat
The rhythms of time
Set apart from the
Rhythms of day
And night?

Should the desert become
Void of the life that
Feels its heat,
And its nights and days,
No purpose would remain
In night and day.

Night and day would have
No being,
Nor existence for
Nothing conscious
Would be there
To be aware of them.

Unless the death does
Come to show them
That death is
Only death of this
Awareness
Of this time
And this space.

Will not the sun
Still shine,
The moon still glow?

The people still
Appease their
Beliefs?

Such delusions.

Forty days;
Forty nights:

‘Tis no wonder he
Was ready for the cross.