Fire EXIT

AristosD

  • 08:03:57 pm on November 9, 2009 | # | 2
    Tags: ,

    A Birthday Poem

    To My Fifties
    Kenneth Koch

    I should say something to you
    Now that you have departed over the mountains
    Leaving me to my sixties and seventies, not hopeful of your return,
    you, who seemed to mark the end of life, who ever would have
    thought that you would burn
    With such sexual fires as you did?  I wound up in you
    Some work I had started long before.  You were
    A time for completion and for destruction. My
    Marriage had ended.  In you I sensed trying to find
    A way out of you actually that wasn’t toward non-existence.
    I thought, “All over.”  You cried, “I’m here!”  You were like traveling
    With no tour guide or even the train schedule.
    As a “Prime of Life” I missed you.  You seemed an incompletion made up of completions
    Unacquainted with each other.  How could this be happening?  I thought.
    Or 
What should it mean, exactly, that I am fifty-seven?  I wanted to be always feeling desire.
    Now you’re a young age to me. And in you, as at every other time
    I thought that one year would last forever.
    “I did the best possible. I lasted my full ten years.  Now I’m responsible
    For someone else’s decade and haven’t time to talk to you, which is a shame.
    Since I can never come back.”  My Fifities!  Answer me one question!
    Were you the culmination or a phase? “Neither and both.” Explain!
    “No time. Farewell!”

     

Comments

  • MadNihilist 21:37 on November 9, 2009 | #

    Two years is a looooong time. =)

  • MgP 11:49 on November 10, 2009 | #

    You will see me any morning in the park
    Reading the comics and the sporting page.
    Particularly I remark
    An English countess goes upon the stage.
    A Greek was murdered at a Polish dance,
    Another bank defaulter has confessed.
    I keep my countenance,
    I remain self-possessed