Day 72. Wednesday 27th June 2018

I'll be back

© 2018 Steve Cook

I've reached an age

Where friends in growing numbers

Are departing for new lives,

Yet each of them should be remembered

By the celebratory epitaph:

"I'll be back"

Or words to that effect.

For the wonderful, beautiful truth of it

Is that few of them if any

Have really gone very far,

And while our bodies

Keep getting dropped or swapped,

Mislaid, abandoned or killed,

All of us remain forever

Who we truly are.

Meanwhile it's admittedly sobering

To know the road to the future

Knows no turning back

And soon it will be my turn too

A short way up the track.

It seems to me however

When I learn about how they lived

That their achievements

Though many were never

Quite as great as their dreams

But at the same time they were nowhere

As small as they could have been.