... flowers and clouds, and softer things
such tenderness wherewith life begins
in stately dorms or bourgeois homes,
or utterly destitute honeycombs,
and passes from versions of innocence
into states of constant sufferance,
painted with smiles and laughs at places
also with meaning but only in traces
-in manner of fame and ranks and degrees
or heartbreak, poverty, loss and disease..
With silent craving for deliverance
from here to blissful ignorance...
we drown, float and drift onwards,
packing memories into pictures, songs, written words
- like treasures, reminders and proofs of past
we make them live longer than we last,
so we may go through them in wrinkled skins
when the counting down of days begins
to end 'up above the world so high
like a diamond in the sky...'