So, I make mistakes!
But I’m happy to do so.
If you learn from them.

Each time I re-read
Something I wrote long ago
I’m closer to me

To be possessed of
The wisdom of youth and the
Vigour of old age.

Seek if you would find
But seek not too intently
That way madness lies

The loving tree that we plant in each other
is the blooming tree
we carry in our hearts.

And the branches can reach out
when we are long gone.

What I really deplore and deprecate in our society
is growing evidence of the spread of iconoclasm.
It is not enough apparently to seek to improve
our own condition.  We are made happiest
by our ability to destroy the reputation of others.

Personally, I will never seek to promote my happiness
by denying other people theirs.
So don’t tell me I should be satisfied with my lot.
Don’t preach to the converted.

Where did it come from?  Where will it go?
I pose the questions, I listen for the answers,
and hear nothing but sibilance
in my defective auditory sense.
But answers there are . . . I know.

Nature has always given the response
That echoed in the nightfall of my soul.
It began in those excursions as a child
and gathered pace in wartime’s exodus,
‘midst shattering of peace and of belief.

‘Twas ever thus, to walk upon the Sussex Downs,
The Surrey Hills, the Essex flats,
To feel the wind upon my cheeks
The song of birdcalls in the air,
And life so full of radiance and joy.

‘Twas ever thus, the yearly trips
To Devon’s headlands and to Cornish beaches.
The voyages across the seas,
the sojourns in yet more distant lands.
Exultation with exheredation.

Decades of travelling, seeking the answers,
so much of the time forgetting the questions;
journeying hither and yon, tracing the clouds
following their dreams, and mine, on shimmering shores,
discovering the sweetness of life grown sour.

And through it all I have known love, excessively,
and never cautiously enough.  A spendthrift
wasting all the wealth of praise and acclamation
in luxuriant homage to his own dissipation,
sleeping with salvation and waking in confusion.

And now, the twilight of a life grown weary
in a constant yet inconstant search for answers,
at last gives way to calamitous acceptance
of the eternal verity.  Ex nihilo is nonsense;
we have no option but to embrace ex materia.

© Joseph Sinclair, May 25 2022

I wish I could shake that feeling of loss.
I wish I could recapture that moment of bliss,
that joyous acceptance of rapture
of halcyon days, beatitude, delectation,
euphoria and serenity.

To bathe in a basin of bliss; to enter a state of bliss.
You don’t seek bliss, bliss happens.
My spirit-ear listens; my spirit-heart feels;
my blissful search suffers, My spirit-mind heals;
Peace and infinity.

I honor the foreboding that appears,
The hesitancy it heralds in the call,
The inadvertent buttress of the fears,
Reluctance to acknowledge the outfall.

And, all the while, the heav’nly choir gives voice,
The prayers devout as any that were heard
But yet recalcitrant insistence on pro-choice,
Determined to maintain faith undeterred.

Wherever we go, whatever we do,
there comes a time ultimately
when we must say goodbye.

We can gaze at the stars, be amazed at the sky,
be enthralled by the galaxies
that may be hidden from view.

But no matter how vast the universe seems
or the new constellations that are ever revealed,
the time surely comes when we must say goodbye.

Before taking our leave, breathing a sigh
as the time of departure draws hurriedly near,
we recognise sadly the last knell appears.

Not alone for ourselves; that has always been so,
but the old earth itself is preparing to go.
And now is the time we must say goodbye.