In December - On Life's Calendar
In December (On Life’s Calendar)
My golden years (am I a fool?) span each day of my life,
their lustrous sheen uncompromised by friends that time’s embraced,
friends’ vacuum’s ghost (their memories), seas’ ripples laps,
the symphonies spent lives composed waft sweetly on aged ears.
I welcome chore and open eyes to morning’s golden sun,
the opportunities revealed (and shade where brows are cooled),
are gifts to me (not tests I hate), like feathers for life’s nest!
Though each day carries night on back, I count all shades as friends.
To postpone life for fifty years until you wear ‘Depends’ (1)
seems ill-advised! No hoarded gold’s enough to ‘perfect’ rest.
All calendars’ brief flames will die, and fate cannot get fooled
by sacrifice for kith and kin (or good works that we’ve done)
as entropy (2) unwinds ‘Big Bang,’ the Godsend of time’s years.
When stars flame out (some meek, some wild), does time die too (take naps)?
How does disorder’s trash revert if God can get erased? (3)
What fools watch burn (bland fiddlers), the bard bleeds with word’s knife. (4)
Brian Johnston
8th of March in 2021
Poet’s Notes:
(1) ‘Depends’ is a brand of diapers sold to help with incontinence issues on both ends of life!
(2) Entropy is a measure of the increasing disorder in the universe as a whole. It can be decreased (only momentarily) in a localized pocket of space. You can clean and straighten up your room, for example, but in doing so, your use of energy to do this means that the entropy of the universe will increase. And it is equally inevitable that your room will be trashed again (its entropy increase) once more even in your absence.
(3) If more ‘Big Bangs’ might (or will) happen and do not require a God to initiate them, one wonders where all the previous universes are now? Is there an ‘elephant graveyard’ somewhere full of old universes whose entropy has maxed out? Forget the ivory! Imagine all the gold one might harvest there! Ha!
(4) In days past, a doctor would ‘bleed’ a sick patient to help them get better. I pray that poetry’s cuts at life are more palliative than that, at least!
Copyright © Brian Johnston | Year Posted 2021
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