meditation on death

Nothing retains its form; new shapes from old.

Nature, the great inventor, ceaselessly

contrives. In all creation, be assured,

there is no death—no death, but only change

and innovation; what we people call birth

is but a different new beginning; death

is but to cease to be the same. Perhaps

this may have moved to that and that to this,

yet still the sum of things remains the same.

~Pythagoras

Ovid, Metamorphoses

translation by A.D. Melville