Late-Starters

Many years with a rising panic  
over Mary Oliver’s question  
      “Tell me, what is it you plan to do  
      with your one wild and precious life?”  
through a mixture of grace and perseverance  
was led eventually to the point  
      “One day you finally knew  
      what you had to do, and began …”  
   
Late-starters have an advantage  
for in your sixties the ridge-line    
between decline and vitality    
narrows towards its ultimate vanishing-point  
as we are challenged to make more delicate choices.  
   
I sit with the grand-children and am thrown  
back to ’82 when my first child was born  
and experience once again  
that non-negotiable gut-feeling of “I would die for them”  
spurred on by the words  
of some even more ancient sage:  
‘Choose Life’.