Thoughts that unfold, intruding in the night,
In the dark and still of the night,
When sleep elude me they come riding, riding
Like a gallant wraith on a phantom steed, white
And amorphous, questing, questing, "What is life?
What, in truth, the story of man?
And I? What thread ravels backward
To where I first began?"

The frayed and frazled thread of time
Leads to a picture in the family album
Of mother and mustachioed father
And another of grandparents, a stern-faced twosome.
The pictures end, and I turn to the past,
To pages of a fragile faded family tree
Expressed in great-grandfather's flowing script
To forebears who sailed an alien sea.

And reached a world to them unknown
The thread ravels on to Scottish braes,
To the greening mists of Ireland
And Essex England's coves and bays
Where a century becomes four-score or more
In time set back ten thousand years
In ice-age hunters who roamed the tundra,
Surviving extremes of cold and fears.

Who came before them and whence they came
Is subject to speculation.
The mood and spirit of spectral sires
Extends the purlieu of imagination.
I envision a hillside in the South of France
And a cave overlooking the valley below,
Where they may have dwelt and multiplied
In the shadowy past, in the long, long ago.

But he wasn't first, the cave-dwelling man,
The thread ravels backward in time
To an environment violent and raw,
To a desolate, comfortless, soulless clime,
Back to the edge of the unknown into light,
From darkness into sun and moon,
I return to my origins in a mind-bending sense
Of a world spinning in a cloud cocoon.

The Good Book says--and science agrees--
That we all evolved from Eve.
If this be true--and who am I to question?-
Then I am compelled to believe
That I am a child of the universe
And we're all the family of man,
Brethren, black, white, red, brown, and yellow,
In the spirit of kinship I extend my hand.