LONG

Time was when time was long(and stories were sagas-
memorized,improvised,extended and extensive Director's Cuts-
Iliads,Odysseys,Paradise Lost,Regained,Lost Again(no TV mini-series-
more Pilgrim's Progress-broadsheet ballads extended and extensive
Often sung or declaimed in a rough and ragged air to the tune of streets
in every indigenous tongue,dialect,style and manner.We
were tribes,then,and our telling of epics(Upanishads,Ramayana)
were the long stories of giants among men and women,and gods among them
We had time to talk(demotic)and to listen(entranced
Magickal declamation,reclamation,demagoguery as democracy
Speakers on soapboxes exhorting mobs to instant action(after they heard long long speeches
sermons from spruikers who knew their verbal craft-and flew into the wind
of articulate opposition.Less a Golden Age-more an Earth Age,personal as insults
Satire and irony via fables and fairy tales ruled..People in circles ,assemblies,churches,ritual
allowed long cadences to fill Sunday silences.Rural,pastoral,bucolics.
Silences inherited from great-grandfathers,before and after wars that buried speeches.
Ballads,poems,songcycles were long then,many remembered and built upon
like the Maori House Of The People,with renovations,elisions,extensions and elaborations
but a common floor plan dependent upon recognition of common(folk)values.
When cities came,they stole silence/made speech bullet points.Telegrams.Morse Code.
MAYDAY for long.Synopses,Cliff Notes,summaries,talking points,punctuation.
We cannot go back.Long is gone.As in life,the question now-is endings...