Endure

I’m an old poet,
old—far too old
to share your youthful plans for power, success.
My task is different. Mine is the poet’s task:
to bring beauty about—to summon 
the taste, the smell, the very feel
of that stranger—ah! that impossible stranger—life.

I was clever with words. My poems, I used to say,
were a woven nest for birds, my bright birds
that sheltered within my nest of words and sang.
But now it’s a different world, a different life.
A world of hope has soured to a world of hate.
Those singing nests I wove for my bright birds
are axed and felled and stilled.
Oh, it was sweet, rich like a song of love,
a song of love I recall from ages gone
sung by a girl I loved, but now
lost in the unrelenting drift of time—
No, this is not the day for delicate songs,
for old loves embedded in sweet verse.
Today I have locked away
those bright poems, the violins, the words
of beauty and of love,
to grasp the trumpets—brazen, harsh,
discordant, unharmonious horns of war.

I look at what I have made these last years—
my poems—these last, dark, frightful years—
and I feel my gut clenched in hot despair.
Every poem cries, Goodbye! Goodbye!
For all falls away; the body fails,
the mind fails, and little time is left—
a handful of days, a pocketful of hours—
small change—and look how quickly spent!

But I tell you this: Though kings and the rich may rule ,
it’s we who are sworn and bound to endure, outlive
this midnight march, to endure ‘til a riper time,
a time of some girl singing again of love,
a day when the poet brings beauty about,
raising, tuning again those deep strings,
praising again that impossible stranger:
                                                            life.