Still Waters

A journey, of sorts.

 

It was perhaps the wrong point in time,
And even perhaps the wrong place
For a journey and so long a journey:
It was not easy and the elements were against us.
Hard times we had.
And my companions were not always amenable,
Always taking things the wrong way.
Of course there were times I regretted
There were things I missed as time went by,
The smiling faces that lost their luster.
But then the teachers unkind and often cruel
And meting out punishments to the wrong kids,
And the work we couldn’t comprehend, the bad grades,
And neighbours hostile and people unfriendly
And the shops dirty and giving the wrong change,
And always in their favour.
In the end I preferred to hide myself away,
Sleeping, eating when hungry,
With my inner voices always muttering
That this made no sense at all.
Then, coming of age I came into more temperate climes
Wet behind the ears, smelling of cheap after-shave.
But running with the pack, having larks after dark,
Standing firm like trees stark against the night sky,
And an old jalopy revving away into the night.
Then we hit the pubs with tables spilling onto the street,
Six hands playing for hard cash at the open door,
And feet kicking each other in mock play.
But there was nothing to be gained here and so I moved on,
And arrived not a moment too soon to a state of grace.
Reaching this place was hard but in the end, satisfactory.
All this was many years ago, I remember,
And looking back would I do it all again...?
But listen here.
Listen here: are we led all this way for
Life or Death? There needs to be life, certainly
We have evidence and cannot doubt. I had seen life and death,
But always understood the difference; this Life is
Hard but mixed with joy, but Death, our death?...
Soon we no longer look forward and start looking back,
To those Kingdoms of the past,
But no longer able to find comfort in those old haunts,
With a foreign people occupying the familiar ground.
I should be glad of another death.

After Eliot