[ p o e t r y 2]

Dust, Riches, & Wheelchairs

I stood in a room tonight
Feeling very small
Surrounded by very powerful people
People with deep pockets
And rich lives.
People who have lived for centuries longer than I.

It's easy to feel small
In a tiny room
Filled with big people.

And then something changed.
A man wheeled in.
He was shrunken, and angry,
And though you could tell
He was once a big man,
He now seemed small:
Dwarfed by his suffering
And swallowed by age.

Even powerful people grow old
And die.

No one escapes futility.
No one escapes the end.
We all die,
Some in youth
And some in the shriveling of old age

It occurred to me then,
As the gentleman
Dropped his pretzel
And was unable to retrieve it
From below his chair,
That while there may be millions more
In his bank account than mine,
That perhaps I'm the lucky one,
Because I may be nothing,
(At least so far on this earth)
But at least I know now
That we're all made of dust
And we all return to dust

01/30/24