“An aged man is a paltry thing
A tattered coat upon a stick”
- W.B.Yeats

The Old Man’s Song

My body rejects this will to move,
And seeks comforts of the dead,
I coax him with this crutch -
My wife had used before
And then motion, to recreate those walks,
With a song in my heart

Around the cemetry of my youth.
A young man jogs past me,
Does he pity me?
Do I envy him?
But those questions dissolve,
In this piece of wisdom I invent
“My inch is your yard
Like your yard is God’s million miles perhaps
And your life an indivisible fraction of His second”
And I carry on…
But my yesterday’s pain is stubborn

It refuses to sleep and awakens,
To remind me what I am now,
A walking corpse,
A diminished life force,
In an undiminished ego.
So here I sit on a park bench gazing,
At everyday sights and sounds,
There is no energy in me to meditate,
(Ah, meditation, that was
A youthful infatuation
An exotic chase
A one sided affair
With nothing to show)
Till the thought of,
Tea and the morning papers
And talks with my friend
On how the world
Has gone terribly wrong,
Takes me away from here
To the reticent comforts of my house.

7/9/2007