Everybody I know looks older now,
much older,
and many have fallen away
like last year’s autumn leaves.
I walk through the noisy light of day
wrapped in a quiet mist of memories
rebounding from the unhearing
as wasted words, phantom vibrations.
Silence is best as I watch your sorrows unfold.
After decades I realize it is not my help that matters,
but my empathy,
and have come to be resigned
to its being as unknown as I am unseen.
Perhaps I, too, walked blindly through kind knowing
by souls of living history in my time,
trailing eddies of wasted empathy
in the wake of my blazing urgency.
So now, I look back with understanding and see,
but can only shout to your budding future as silence.
It seems our lives must be this way
so you can discover your anguish
with the same freshness as I did mine.

25 June 2017

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