Save me O Lord from all this change
‘Look abroad thro' Nature's range,
‘Nature's mighty law is change'1;
Yea, change is everything, comm'ner or king,
Change is progress; or left I'm so to guess.
Open up and sooner shall thine life change,
Advised Buddha, and there's a rainbow's range
Of wisdom; so taught I thought me to change,
Soon to change mind from no mean a challenge.
‘If ye like not a thing, go ‘head, change it,
‘And if ye can't, change, change the way ye think'2,
If not, there's still a way: to wait, to wit,
Till what ye like not, changes in a wink.
And I'm convinced, ‘nought in this world endure'3,
The world may either change the way I want—
A Buddhist way when things on their own cure!
If not, to a changed me, it least does haunt.
And I agree, ‘weep not the world changes'4,
For reason there's to weep, were it to keep
A stable, changeless state, in stony ease,
E'en a stone changeth, if not in a leap.
And every birth of a brazen new truth
Has caused mischief, nay, oft great upheaval;
A change agent, nor in right frame of youth,
Let me not be one, disaster to deal!
Things change, and we too change, we more than things,
‘The old order changeth, yielding to new'5,
While change of habit irks the lay and kings,
Hope mints new order to strut with tired view!
And all progress, a twain-edge'd old sword,
‘Preserving order amid all the change,
‘Amid the preserved order preserve change'6;
Save me, O Lord, from this balancing board!
_____________________________________________ ___________
1. Robert Burns: Let not women e'er complain.
2. Mary Engelbreit.
3. Ludwig Boerne: ‘Nought endures but change'.
4. William Cullen Bryant:
‘Weep not that the world changes—
did it keep a stable changeless state,
it were cause indeed to weep'.
5. Alfred Lord Tennyson: ‘The passing of Arthur'.
6. Alfred North Whitehead:
‘The art of progress is to preserve order amid change,
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poem by Aniruddha Pathak
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