WE HAVE BEEN HERE BEFORE

While thumbing through a book of comic and curious verse, I found this gem (and was inspired to write more).

WE HAVE BEEN HERE BEFORE
Morris Bishop (1893-1973)

I think I remember this moorland,
The tower on the top of the tor;
I feel in the distance another existence:
I think I have been here before.

And I think you were sitting beside me,
In a fold in the face of the fell,
For Time at its work'll go round in a circle,
And what is befalling, befell.

"I have been here before!" I asserted,
In a nook on a neck of the Nile.
I once in a crisis was punished by Isis,
And you smiled. I remember your smile.

I had the same sense of persistence
On the site of the seat of the Sioux;
I heard in the teepee the sound of a sleepy
Pleistocene grunt. It was you.

The past made a promise, before it
Began to begin to begone.
This limited gamut brings you again. Damn it,
How long has this got to go on?

WE HAVE BEEN HERE BEFORE (PT II)
Sarah Hartwell (2007)

I'm sure I remember the shoreline,
The cove with the caves in the cliff,
Where once we sheltered from tropical swelter,
These repeats are boring me stiff.

A far distant world in the future,
A monster mooched up with a moan,
An alien planet, but you are here, damn it!
Good grief can't you leave me alone?

Time is a terrible mistress,
She plays with the what and the when,
And makes a deception to fool my perception,
So that what has gone round comes again.