Wednesday, July 09, 2014
Rivers Carved
Rivers Carved
(for the elders and the poets grown old)
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing,
for every tatter in its mortal dress.
Yeats
It is enough,
these years engraved
upon the face,
the wrinkles like dry river beds
coursing across
the flesh.
What, we ask,
did it mean
to be young
and passionate?
What was the purpose
of so much sorrow,
so many griefs?
Who shattered our hearts
so many times?
How often did we fail
to meet the mark
we had set for ourselves?
How did it happen,
that meeting with the One?
Abandonment,
deceit, a taste of glory--
we drank
our fill of these
and now navigate our craft
into the harbor,
take our ease,
contemplate the distant flute
of time.
Dorothy Walters
July 6, 2014
