I

May God delay for us that day
When our children flagrantly surpass us,
Like empty books, they tidy us away
Into their dusty orphan's casket.

And in old age, caught in a vicious orbit
Of empty injuries and wistfulness
So proud, so bored we are that
We cut the string of our attachments.

So little binds us to this life:
Some scraps of greying photos
Perhaps a dog's reproachful eyes
Fixed on the yellow flagstones;

Wallpaper the colour of parting;
A voice trapped down the phone line,
Prophesising our meeting –
Out there on the nameless horizon.

II

Far harder than the very hardest labour
It is to find yourself without a task
To know there is no water left to savour
And that your life has burned to ash at last

That you are needed by precisely no-one,
That your loneliness – it is beyond repair,
And to the depths, the depths you're going,
With only ruins left behind you here.

That power lies now with another century
And you have lagged behind, absurd and sorry,
Time is a wall that widens endlessly
And death – she is your promised legacy.

III

Glancing at yourself, still half-asleep
All of a sudden you can see that lines
Have gathered round your mouth and cheek,
The ruins of your face around your eyes.

And you are just a shard of days gone by
You never will be whole as once you were
Exactly like your torn and tattered rhyme –
And you can only stand there numb, and stare.

And every day, again, again, again
You gather yourself up once more
How hard it is, oh God, to start each day
How terrible the structures at your core.

How hard it is to face entirely alone
The noisy army of your ugly chores
Oh, who will heed your prayers to postpone -
Surely there is another tune within the score?

And, oh, what quiet heroism's called upon
To get up in the morning. Start again.
And know that this is life, you're pressing on,
Although the purpose may be hard to ascertain.