Journey's End  Janet

some are already

        there

some busy themselves 

committees, volunteers 

puffing up their egos 

prove they are really here

some stay sequestered 

at their desks 

and count their stuff 

unable to divert

their thoughts from 

the inevitable end

and some of us

still linger in our youth 

before the wrinkle 

lines 

dancing and loving 

on the brink of eternity

the rest still gather 

at the retirement home bar 

savoring Happy Hour 

and given the challenge 

of news from outside

you'd never guess how 

safe and satisfying it is 

to be with friends

at Journey's End

Last Chapter - Helen

It’s been a long time since Old Age crept up behind me,

since she began nudging me down this darkening path.

Her quiet voice whispers soothingly:

“It’s all right. Don’t be afraid.

The last chapter is always the best.”

Proceeding with faltering steps,

 I hear crunching sounds under my feet, 

They are the sounds of dried memories,

of faded loves, past joys, retreating sadness.

It’s all right. Don’t be afraid.

Trees are never as eloquent

 As when they turn red and gold,

when they shed their leaves in a last hurrah.

And shortened days bring early stars,

lighting up the skies of tomorrow.

When the sun departs behind brown hills,

it leaves a glorious trail of yellows, pinks and lilacs. 

The last chapter is yet to be written,

So words must be carefully chosen

and punctuation, precise and true.

At the end of this path, I’ll find a gossamer door,

a soft opening between the Here and the There.

When the last twilight dissolves into night,

illuminate me! Wrap me in the nebula of beginning again.

                View Helen's Biography by clicking AUTHOR'S BIOGRAPHIES in right panel.

Natural Order John Field

When I was fifteen my faith unraveled to its core

for some reason I no longer remember.

That was the year I stopped begging

the earth's absentee landlord for an afterlife

and began paying close attention

to the natural order of things,

such as the graceful sight of pheasants in flight

before I blasted them out of the sky.

In July our valley turned into a landscape

of sudden vanishings when a flood

stampeded livestock and uprooted trees

down the Upper Iowa River.

On Main Street I watched men wearing hip boots

and dead smiles loot grocery stores

and then disappear in motor boats.

In our backyard the prehistoric stink 

of rotting debris

outranked the fragrance of honeysuckle.

Deep in a daze that afternoon

and far beyond what I knew

I hiked the high-strung bluffs that circle our town

until I reached the sacred peak of Pulpit Rock

and then looked down into the angry heart

of a violent river. No answers there. Nothing. Never.

Just swamps where meadows used to be

and the kind of truth that's reserved for its victims.

So I looked up and watched a hawk

pause at the tip of its arc

and hang suspended in the air

as if welded there. Seconds later it broke free

from heaven's gravity

and slurred earthward in a liberating blur.

Then swooped up again so close to me

that I could see the tip of a tail

hanging out of its beak.

During that indelible moment

everything changed from anarchy

into an ethical life not forever

but long enough for me to forgive myself

and the next day sell my shotgun to a friend.

WOE 2 Michael James

Joy, which used to run like an open faucet

full and strong before me, 

now dribbles, if it comes at all, as if a prolonged drought had 

dried up all its springs and turned its streams to dust. 

And even when I hear the small, insistent voice saying,

"Oh, but you know the line is thinly drawn twixt joy and sorrow, 

making them but two sides of the same coin, 

and equally valuable,” a coin of whose realm 

I want to know.

Joy was mine as a carefree youth, I spent my coin freely, 

barreling down lanes in the dappled sunlight of the forest, 

Bound for winding paths, breezy lakes, 

trout-filled streams, spreading lawns. 

A bicycle was my badge of freedom, license to roam 

wherever legs could take me, 

"Be back for supper," my only admonition.

Woe was someone else's, over a distant horizon, 

something even elders rarely mentioned, 

or if they did, used tones so hushed they would not dull my day. 

If I lived selfishly, it was due to the cornucopia of Nature, 

her brimming basket from which I ate and drank 

all day long, no thought of the morrow, 

catching glimpses of heaven in the paths l followed. 

And when it rained, the library, always at hand, 

like Nature, unstinting in its generosity.

During term, surrounded by people day and night, 

I sought refuge in the quiet of the woods and lakeside, 

so when summer came, I just stayed longer where I longed to be. 

"What did you do all day? I haven't seen you once." 

"At play in the fields of the Lord," I might have answered, 

though instead I must have said, 

"Nothing much. Went for a bike ride."

Today, looking back on my slow decay through time, I see

I still carry that badge of freedom, the bicycle, though its range 

under my seat, is like that of the poor fish 

in the puddle of the dried up reservoir 

waiting for the rain that doesn't come.

I do have Google Earth, though, 

which allows me to look down on those 

lanes I rode, paths l walked along, lakes I swam. 

Changes, of course, are glaring: more people, 

houses, parking lots, shops, and always, fewer big trees.

Thank God for memory ! Without it, I'd be a pinhead on a stick,

plunked down wherever I happened to be, 

deracinated, an empty crock, 

but full of woe. 

So it's memories now which keep old woe away 

which else would rob my heart of joy.

The ancient Greeks told each other to call no man happy 

until he has died well.

C.S.Lewis extended that precaution to involve experiences: 

No experience is complete 

until it is safely ensconced in memory; then it may be assayed.

I value my good memories (as don't we all?), 

though the few bad ones, about hurting others, 

I would love to leave. 

l'm mindful of Macbeth's agony 

when he's regretting the murders: 

"My way of life is fallen into the sere,” he laments. 

He can expect no friends in his old age, 

just curses, not loud but deep, 

for the harm he's done, 

not that he should have expected to live long anyway, 

unlike most of us today. in spite of our missteps, 

the years we live now give us time enough to experience regret 

of youthful errors, of hurts caused by our too little love.

But there's no point in dwelling on them, those errors; 

they can't be changed. 

Instead, let's conjure up a thousand greens and blues: 

intense blue sky at twelve thousand feet;

deep blue sea off Tintagel's cliffs, greens of beech, oak, 

chestnut, pine, and grass in forest's shade,

flickering sunlight on half closed lids 

under canopy of leaves up high.

Though not historical, these memories, 

they are valid collective or generalized impressions 

from countless experiences, 

and none the less vivid for all that, 

wherein the individual event became 

submerged beyond recognition, beyond recall.

When l've done something countless times,

the details of single instances blend together. 

If they didn't, my mind would become so cluttered 

l'd be unable to think. 

People with total recall must have 

a means of retrieving memories 

Lest they be overburdened by detail.

This dwelling on one's memories, or living in the past, so often called, 

may not be done by choice but by default, 

there being only unpleasantness in the present. 

So why not keep one eye on the road, the other on the past.

What else are two eyes for, anyway?