Youth
I wonder what it is like to be old and white-whiskered,
For as yet I am young, and wisdom
Laughs merrily at me from afar as I chase her,
Ever-stumbling.
My life is but new-started,
My days are few, fresh, and hope-full.
Yet my nights are heavy with thoughts and people and
Times remembered.
What will it be to remember even more?
And then my friends not gone away but
Gone, their laughter forgotten from the world,
Their song silenced.
Nevermore, quoth the raven, and nevermore will
The things I remember exist again, and time
Will come when no one remembers
Except me.
For in remembrance a person lives, somehow,
And the only true death in this world, as
The Greek said, was being finally and utterly
Forgotten.
The song of our youth will be silenced soon
Nevermore to be sung again,
Nor shall there be any who remember the
Glory of its joy.
Joy we feel in life, in the blood that
Pounds in our veins, joy in love, hoped
And yet unseen. Joy in life yet unlived, joy in
Joys yet untasted.
And behind it all we wonder, sadly.
When will it end, when our friends will go,
When our love will be parted, when our joys are all
Remembered?
Of a time, I sit and think.
And when I do, I think mostly tragic thoughts
For life is so here, so present, so much around and in me
I can’t imagine less before than behind.
Laughing is enough sometimes when thinking of life’s vanity,
Yet tears seem more appropriate when I
Think about life, and about death, and how much of
Each is in each.
Life is full of death, ours and others and
Ours in others, and death, we know, is naught
But renewed, reinvigorated, reborn life
Age after age.
And so we cannot but sing, laugh, dance, and drink,
We cannot but joy in Christ. For we remember,
Though not with our eyes, when He was us and died,
When we were Christ (though not yet) and lived.
Let us feast like lunatics, rejoice like imbeciles,
Dance like madmen, and love idiotically all the days of our vanity.
For we are drunk on the wine of life –
We are young.
