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Dancing with change

"Change is good, but no change

Is better"

It rang through the great hall

As it has resounded silently

Through the ages.

It rang past the faces

Of stern masters and poets

And lords of learning,

Asleep in their hidden academies.

Change is good;

Newton unveiled the unchanging laws

And freed us into new sight.

This inheritance has become one

Under eras of division and strife.

Havens and deep places

Have to be protected from the raging

Winds and the glowing deserts.

The corridors have widened:

Fields have given way to new trees

And new cries of ecstasy;

Dreaming spires no longer dream

The same things;

Monoliths hold books now, and philosophies

Sprung from harsh evolutions

Wither thought;

Freedom has given birth to unfreedom

Reason has triumphed

Over the unbounded creative spirit.

The air is dryer where no change

Is better.

Old ways kept old, protected from

The devils of the gate,

Turn the bones white, and stiffen

The mind's luminous dance

Into new ages, and happier flight.

Change is a god that Heraclitus

Saw in the ancient river.

And as we keep things the same

The river works beneath us

The god works his gentle and sad ironies

On our eyes hidden from encroaching

Devils at the gate.

The river runs; the fields sprout

Strange new mushrooms,

Libraries yield new books

In the charged margins of the old.

And reason, trapped in philosophies

Held in iron, turns on itself

Like a caged tiger, and prowls

The diminished boundaries

Of a shrinking world,

Shrinking because of the horror

Of the devils at the gates.

Song is sweet; music prays to change;

Poets pray to the goddess of surprise;

And mathematicians would be unmoored

In those realms where no change

Is a wild river of factors.

Love is seduced by change;

Itself unchanging.

Time, serene, remains indifferent

To our iron will, our willed philosophies.

The world grows or shrinks

Of its own necessity, its own vision;

The river makes all things dance

To a music they never understood

At the time.

And the giants who built walls

Meant to be proof against Time

And the desert ravages

Found in their sleep

That the walls had become change

Had moved, had dissolved, had sprouted

The feared things;

Or worse, that the feared things

Had seeped in underfoot,

Or through the air,

Had changed the frontiers

Of their rigid dialogue.

Walls invite invasion.

Walls end up trapping within

The demons meant to be kept out;

For the demons merely turn into

The giants, grow in them, like a silent cancer.

Oases attract the eyes of the hungry.

Protected places, luminated by fame,

Attract the rage of the unlucky,

The unfortunate, the dispossessed,

And all those who are shut out

In the outer darknesses of our age.

All around, leonids, planets, stars

Are whirling;

The cosmos shrinks and grows,

Dreams and flows

Under the immutable spell of change;

All around, lives collapse, empires

Quietly fall and cave in

From natural exhaustion,

Dynasties give up the ghost of ambition,

Towers rage with the unmeasured cadences

Of festering hunger,

Continents drift apart,

Peoples no longer recognise one another

And wars eat up fathers and frail sisters,

And houses fall on one another,

And roads break into unhallowed speech.

It is natural to want calm places

Where stillness dwells

Where cool waters flow

Where concerts radiate music and grace

Where the mind contemplates crystals,

Pure forms, glowing legends, complex melodies

And books that keep their hidden thoughts

In the silence of their musty pages.

It is natural to want serenity

And flowering gardens of lovely symmetry

And Virgil's spreading beeches

And the lost happy times of the wise ones

Who were wise in the knowledge

That the mind cannot comprehend all,

But at least can smile at infinity.

But the river flows, and so must we.

Change is the happy god that Heraclitus

Saw in the golden river.

Spread illumination through this darkening world;

Spread illumination through this darkening world.

No change is good, but dancing

Gracefully with change is better.

Ben Okri is a Nigerian poet and novelist who contributes frequently to Ode.

Copyright: Ben Okri, 2007. All rights reserved.