Poems (Kennedy)/Reincarnation

by Sara Beaumont Kennedy

REINCARNATION?

THEY come to all of us just now and then,
 Like fleeting spirit-memories,
The visions of some place we never saw—
 Elusive, fading, phantasies
That startle us as old familiar haunts
 We knew and loved in some lost time,
Some age forgotten that has dropped away
 As dies the cadence of a rhyme.

We turn a page, and there before us lies
 A picture of the crawling Nile,
And instantly we know, untold, what lies
 Beyond the rushes, mile on mile.
We are not here, for we slip back again,
 A part of that far age and land—
With Cleopatra and with Antony,
 Treading those wastes of desert sand.

Or in a room of guests one speaks of Rome,
 The room fades out, and in a breath
In crowded Coliseum we have turned
 Our thumbs to signal life or death.
Or else again in thought of storied Greece
 We feel a wind like fanning flame,
And know that once we ran a panting race
 In long forgot Olympic game.

Or coming closer to our daily life—
 Sometimes we reach a stranger's door
And recognize it through mysterious sense
 And say: "We have been here before,"
Though we are sure we never trod the path
 Nor saw the house until that hour;
Yet there is etched upon our consciousness
 The merest detail of a fragile flower.

What can it be, this submerged other self,
 This surety of having seen
And been a vital part of those lost years
 That time's relentless sickles glean?
Have we lived other lives than this today,
 Recast each time in varied mold,
And are these prescient instincts memories,
 In very truth, of days long told?