Old Age, Death and the Poet

Mornings come unsolicited; peeling away the comforting edges of night
Secret vistas my mind had visited hang surreal in dreamy lingering light
Outside, cold clouds drift the blue; covering my dreams in shades of gray;
Blanketing sorrows with somber hue; hopes of tomorrow with cruel today

The spring of eternal hope has stopped; plugged with rocks of insecurity;
Fallen from vast walls around my heart where time and death are surety
The hoary frost upon the land has settled into my thinning hair and beard
Things I know and understand have become instruments of pain and fear

Cummings said, “Old age sticks”. Shakespeare asked, “What dreams may come?”
Is that it then? Do we cease living; fathoming depths of death; grown numb?
I am left with the love song of Eliot sitting by the crash of stormy seas
Feeling I am but a pair of ragged claws. The mermaids will not sing for me.

Distant hills are beckoning; draped in purple gowns and egret feather hats
Where once I roamed; a boy and his dog, why do I choose to remember that?
What is happiness but peace of mind? Is it also adventure into the unknown?
If that were so; death would be kind to frail and crippled flesh and bone.

Ms. Dickinson could not stop for death and so it kindly stopped for her
But now I count my hours left passing in passenger train-like blur
Stop for me I beckoned but rumbling along; it seems life passed me by
My voice fades in faltering echoes as my poetry and songs both die

Do not, I beg, expect from me; visions of eternity. I never met with God.
Shall I be saved; spared from the grave or sickening thud of falling clods?
The dead do not hear; so I might be spared the sound of devouring earth
I strive to recall those first sounds of arrival from the moment of my birth

Where does youth go? In truth, I do not know. But it can be captured by hearts
This life I am married to like a wife will soon divorce me as we part
Perhaps I will find my youth again in distant hills beyond the clouds
Will dreams return with life reborn or am I only dreaming now?