I pushed tonka trucks as a child and the stars and the trees were a mystery. I remember squinting at the lights outside as it rained, staring in wonder at the dazzling colours they radiated. Now I watch a computer monitor and the dazzling has left me.

The poetry departed, I flow no longer; the dam shored up like infinite potential.

There is a through-line, a flow that is our heritage as humans. An onward motion, a wavular cascade that swells through the single-celled life-form to the upright ape.

We are the tide and the through-line threads us like a hauler’s fishing nets. Onwards it pulls through the silt, the sludge and the sea. Just to hold it is to roil in the history of the water.

No dam contains it. It cuts through us. We do not own it; it owns us. We cannot loosen it or shake it off. We cannot dampen it or resist it.

We can only confront it, reckon with it, try to understand it, accept it into our lives.

The through-line’s forward motion raises further questions. The earth revolves and in its circle questions the cosmos. A wall of tears, it circles a sacred hearth, walled in by the mountains and the trees, held close by fistfuls of ancestors.

Even the earth itself cannot shake it off, cannot answer it.

No one knows us. Or some know us, but they are like shadows on this wide earth, the earth a shadow on a cosmic sea, lost in the pregnant darkness of the past.

Through the silt and the sludge, slack-jawed and sorrowful, we hold the through-line of the ancients, and we walk on.

The through-line haunts us. It is our greatness. To the sinews it threads us, and spun out from this sphere of tears it embroiders heaven’s web.