A Bower in the Arsacides

A hippie peddles jewelry
Beneath a poinciana tree,
A mother picks her daughter up
Backlit before an endless sea.

All of this life of business,
The local news, the cheerful mess,
Takes place within these sixty miles—
Limit amid limitlessness.

And is this Earth an island too?—
A grain of sand, a drop of blue,
Lost in a lonely vast of space,
That even light treks slowly through?

And are our thirty thousand days
Just such an island when we gaze
Through tossing frangipani boughs
At what must question all our ways?

—Frederick Turner