58 - Reaping the Harvest: Lucretius

I read this excerpt from Lucretius at my mothers funeral in 2009:

No single thing abides; but all things flow__ .
Fragment to fragment clings
the things thus grow - Until we know and name them.
By degrees they melt, and are no more the things we know.

Globed from the atoms falling, slow or swift
_I_ see the suns, _I_ see the systems lift Their forms;
and even the systems and the suns
Shall go back slowly to the eternal drift.

Thou too, oh earth--thine empires, lands, and seas--
Least, with thy stars, of all_ the galaxies,
Globed from the drift like these,
like these thou too Shalt go.
Thou art going, hour by hour, like these.

Nothing abides. The seas in delicate haze Go off;
those moonéd sands forsake their place;
And where they are, shall other seas in turn
Mow with their scythes of whiteness _other_ bays.

The seeds that once were we - take flight and fly,
Winnowed to earth, or whirled along the sky,
Not lost but _disunited_.
LIFE LIVES ON.
It is the lives, the lives, the lives, that die.

Observe this dew-drenched rose of Tyrian grain--
A rose today ,,, But you will ask in vain tomorrow what it is;
and yesterday it was the dust, the sunshine and the rain.

This bowl of milk, the pitch on yonder jar,
Are strange and far-bound travelers come from far
This is a snow-flake that was once a flame--
The flame was once the fragment of a star.

I found the verses here: http://www.blackcatpoems.com/l/no_single_thing_abides.html

(The weird punctation was to help me with the vocal stresses)

I found a reading of 'On the Nature of Things' at LibriVox:

http://librivox.org/on-the-nature-of-things-by-titus-lucretius-carus/

I was curious to hear a reference to 'corn'. I was under the impression that corn was brought from the 'New World' after the 1490's. Am I wrong about that?

clem

Fascinating article in The New Yorker regarding philosophy and pandemics...

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/inv…