“Great is the art of beginning, but greater the art is of ending”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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how we age is both simultaneously
conscious and unconscious,
uncontrolled and uncomfortable

we never fail to recognize the mirror image, yet,
always thinking out loud in our brain that’s not me!

some remember their successes; others, do not,
perhaps they cannot recall the few, or more likely
acknowledge them as triumphs, as the scale is a
canon always in flux by time grinding us fine

we readily admit, or do not deny, the lines upon our bodies
are highway markers of journeys, yet we know not
who built these signposts, how they came to be here,
but that they ours, unique and accumulated, undeniable

Longfellow’s observation above hits me
with the  fullness of a wet washcloth;
intemperate and stinging,
but not unpleasantly so.

each of our beginnings are artful;
full of promise and worthy tales;
we think this. is normative,
the way a young life is proscribed,
meant to be enjoyed.

of course, this is not necessarily so;
indeed, the exiting is a violent decay,
unrelenting and foisted upon us and
we try, to amend it, our transient departure,
so that we remove the artifice, keep only the art,
the skilled communication of what we valued,
the things that are progeny, living or material,
those clues to whom we are, to whom it may concern, 
we were…

Dec. 25, 2021