Hundredth Birthday 5-29-2017
I.
A hundred years of age—a birthday rarely reached;
He never got to fifty, and fifty years are gone
And more. That afternoon the TV set was on—
I wasn’t even five years old—and while we watched
A Fractured Fairy Tale, they broke in with the news
And straightway, all around, the very world waxed sad.
The shock and grief-- the tear-stained face my mother had--
Made clear to me this was no case of common blues,
And that something truly frightful had come to pass.
I didn’t fully comprehend it all, but saw that all
About me seemed to weep, and so I wept as well.
Since then, people forget; the world grieves less and less,
As history careers in its relentless path:
Unsolved equations in some inscrutable math.
II.
I see that day: the brilliant sun, the motorcade,
The crowds, his smile; his sandy hair was flying in
The breeze… then but a moment later, dying in
His lady’s lap. I see it in the films they made
Both then and now-- with eyes not five years old
But sixty: and mourn now, not as I did back then,
But with a comprehensive grasp. The evil men
Have wrought lives on; yet like some story never told,
The good he might have brought to life? Aborted, all:
And all the while we strain to hear some rhyming call,
And strive to hear reason’s trumpets bravely blowing
In vain: and hence I grieve for him anew, now knowing.
Copyright © J P Marmaro | Year Posted 2018
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