October Poems 2024 >> what is my life

A poem for each day of the month in which I was born

DAY 26
what is my life

what is my life upon this golden strand,
tomorrow gone, although now, here, i stand,
a breath of shallow air upon the lung
of God’s great universe, where i am flung?

i am a blink of eye sparked by a glimpse
of paradise, from which man, fallen, limps
upon an earth that swallows soon his rhyme,
to make him but a blot in space and time.

i am a word scarce fallen from the lips,
a dance scarce cradled by a mother’s hips,
a butterfly whose butter, on the fly,
spreads out its wing in readiness to die.

i am the whisper of a fallen sigh,
a surge of life too soon to atrophy,
as, in the concourse of time’s cut and thrust,
my immanence soon crumbles in the dust.

i am a smile that laminates the face
of morbid frowns with faith and hope and grace;
a hand that touches pain and plague and plaque
ere, crippled soon, it languish from love lack.

i am a voice out in life’s wilderness,
where blind, dark-cornered men will not confess
they love the darkness, rather than the light,
because their deeds are evil in God’s sight.

i am a poet of the deepest ink,
whose nuances shall ne’er become extinct,
until a dying man out in the cold
can find his way into the Shepherd’s Fold.

what is my life, if not a fading flow’r
that marks eternity by day and hour?
to bloom and kiss the world, my one desire,
whose manifest, thereafter, shall expire.

© Copyright 2024 October 26
by Clyve A. Bowen♫