(After Cavafy)

Do not let your life get so far
ahead of you, busy and distracted,
that you meet it on the way back
a stranger, an alien.

Your years are long and vigorous.
They curl upon the sand
like S-shaped tidal waves, as the bay
itself seeps out of the vast, gray sea.

Tomorrow, if you meet yourself,
burdensome and strange,
you will have lost
your one chance for glory.

You will have lost your way
in a dark wood, as another poet put it.
You will have lost
the mothering protection of the sea,

whose gentle tides are always
taken away, never to return the same.