Ponce, my friend, congratulations
On a job well started,
On a task now finished;
The quest, the vision of a man
Centuries ahead of his time.
An unfinished search,
How frustrating it must have been,
A burning conviction,
You died, you believed
But, in the end, you never knew.
My hat's off to you, Ponce,
If you had only known
Answers come most often to
Those who are not seeking;
Problem is, they don't know.
The steam rising from thousands
Of rain-drenched literati and glitterati,
Mesmerized in a mercantile minuet,
Speaking volumes other
Than your truth.
Far beyond the halls of books,
The babble of barter long subsided,
Quiet conversations of exploration,
Words hanging in the humid night air
Uncover the truth that was always there.
Wish you were there, Ponce,
You'd have been proud,
Unlikely players moving about your stage
In the play you never finished,
Their lines your testament.
It's an improbable cast which
Realizes the dream on your behalf,
Not knowing the search was their own,
Not knowing that actually it was his...
Until embraced.
A killer snail leaves a glistening path,
A gecko darts among the vines,
Together a tropical tortoise and hare,
Oblivious to the profundity
Unfolding before them in the night.
Time is measured other than by hours,
More as the mollusk and the lizard,
The pace of discovery is here and not,
But here nonetheless,
The truth cannot be taken away.
You need only find it, and
Ponce, old man, you looked in all the
Wrong places, traveled too many miles,
Searched too hard, and...
You did it alone.© 1993 AZTexts Publishing, Inc.