The Time Before The End of Time
—a poem by Eric Hanna

The Time Before 
The End of Time

The pause
Before
The gilded sunset
Welling, quiet presence
Of a windless night before there comes a storm

The cause
After
The last effect
The springy, weightless feeling
Of kissing night-time air in summers warm
When the horizon of our days
Meets forever-sky eternity
Where the poem does not pause before the rhyme
The dead-alive of moments lost
Makes me realize we're living in
The time before the end of time

If there's only void before it
And nothing after comes
Then the separation, pale between the two
Is the days we paid
Attention, to who we'd want to be
And avoided doing things we can't undo

So I'll just be in highest heaven
Where I see both sides of the coin
And continuation no longer defines
Why I'm different than I was
And it won't matter because
It happened in the time before the end of time


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Eric Hanna is a philosophy teacher from central Canada. He informs us that his poetic influences include JRR Tolkien and Tom Waits. In his free time he enjoys writing, especially about himself in the third person.