The cast changes

at terrifying speed.
At midnight last night
multitudes still drew breath
that now lie silent and motionless.
At that same hour hosts of new
biographies were still waiting to begin,
and they have since burst forth
onto a world that will only know
most of them
in the abstract.
Sometimes I imagine standing
on some impossible precipice
on one of those midnights
and seeing billions of
individual lights glowing in a huge
dark valley before me,
looking like an immense city
in the desert.
I imagine
that I can distinguish each of them
by their individual colors,
ones never seen
before those particular lights
started shining, and never to be seen again
after they are extinguished.
As I watch, some of the lights go dark
forever
and many more new lights
shine forth
for the first time.
It doesn't change the picture
too very much, I suppose,
if I just look for 24 hours.
But if I come back in ten
years, I would see
half a billion of the lights I saw before
now burned out,
and a billion more I had never seen
now radiating.
And if I returned after a century,
very few of the lights that
I recognized at the start
would still be displaying their
unique colors.
I would look at a picture of the
valley taken on that first night,
and hold it in front of me as
I saw the galaxy as it looked
36,525 nights later.
And I would know,
perhaps, that my light
may have been just one of
many, but it had never
been seen before,
and its like will never be seen
again, and
that that is enough.