We Carry a Torch
Written on a bridge in Florence, watching the Arno pass below — a meditation on what we carry forward and what we leave behind.
There are places that make you think about time differently. Not its passage — that’s everywhere — but its weight. The accumulation. The way certain stones have stood through more than you ever will. This came from a bridge in Florence, looking down at the Arno, the Ponte Vecchio still standing where it has been for almost seven hundred years.
The poem isn’t really about Florence. It’s about what any old place can ask of you, if you let it: which of the truths you’ve gathered are worth carrying forward, and which were always going to fall away.
In here are ancient lands
Filled with master plans
Sights of endless streams
And mountains aplenty
Better than cobwebs
And the dread of decay
The sea will always be there
To wash away a sense of stay
Indeed we carry a torch
That will shine eternally
So long as we march on
And continue to see
I wonder the precious truths
Compiled in the annals of time
Which ones I’ve learned
And the ones I’ll leave behind
The truth I keep returning to from that bridge: the river moves, but the stones stay. The dread of decay is real — for buildings, for people, for the things we make — but somehow some things hold. Not forever. Just long enough to be useful to someone who needed them.
What we carry forward is rarely the whole truth. It’s the version of it that helps the next person stand. Maybe that’s enough. Maybe that’s the only reason any of it was worth lighting in the first place.
— JTC