Saddens when strength fritters, muscles run to flab with age;
a once smooth surface wrinkles bold etchings of joy and sorrows
while rough landscape seizes the trophy, buries beauty beneath
creases and squinting eyes and drooping girth and jarring joints.
Look at a mirror—you're yet you at heart though reflection feigns.
Beauty is forever, not strength, not health. Life has a bell-shaped
trajectory—a sure-fire sine curve, though the sonic boom pales
at prime. Blurred vision fails to see the diminishing present
or the long haul ahead; ought to, and so cuddle the rhythm,
bound up to breast the finish line. Else gamble at summer's crest;
winter in the trough with a wobble. What an old age with sighs
and stings, peace paling with aching joints and flabby muscles!
Robbed of youthful verve, a pain prick twitches the nerves.
What a youth spent as if now's forever! We all need a brace ahead
of when the frail frame fails at nine or ninety... or in between!
The wise may think otherwise. Maybe!! The pudding has proof.
All I know: Old age is divine!
© Celestine S. Ikwuamaesi
4 February, 2019
The silk lines billow far out
in the thin sky
saturated with light blue sunshine.
I hold them together
in my left fist
on my hi-tech chariot;
my right hand twists
and we are loose from earth.
The silken lines undulate
over continents;
gallop the golden stallions
as I observe the people
releasing the flavours of their foods
the clench of cereals, the delights of fruit,
the iron of flesh, the sere of burnt blood
coming to me in a gracious sine curve.
It seems nothing has changed much
since the first chariot chase;
men still do not look
me straight in the face,
building dynasties on the sherds of others,
constructing palaces
to supply the noble rubble
on which to found new fallacies.