The Nietzschean Hourglass, or The Future's Misfortune

The Nietzschean Hourglass, or The Future's Misfortune

Once, as my thought was being drawn through
daylight into the bronze corridors of dusk and
thence into the promise of dark, I heard out
there the strained voice of the hourglass
calling for someone to turn it over and show
that the future is just an illusion, that what lay
ahead was only the past again and again. I
was too young for such an idea, so it came
back years later as if to prove its own point.

                                         Mark Strand