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.