Life

Everything without, taste without, eyes without, mouth without.

First comes oblivion, then mere and childlessness.

Second is history. Eventful, strange, this ends that.

Last comes all of what is seen in just a scene at last where we confess.

Life’s first scene, at first it does sound in whistles and pipes,

In treble and then screech, in a whine as sharp as glass,

Toward the childish sounds, toward and forward again, turning its voice large,

Turning its voice big, its eyes blue , its green grass.

It will sit wide in the world. It will be a saved well whose youthfulness

Is carried in its side on a pouch while its face carries its refrain

And nose and spectacles and its legs are with trousers and feet slippered lean.

Its hat will be a bearing brim to capture all the rain.

Lean it into shifts of age from six to the sixty-sixth where

In part its play it gives such loved moments and instances of life,

Buzzing saws, timbers wise of full cut, formal of beard and severed eyes

Good with belly, found fair and just and right and cursed and filled with strife.

Its reputation bubble the squeeking, quarrels quick and sudden,

Honoured the jealous if pardon is begged or justice required

Then like well meant oaths strange and full pardon to be given

And the order goes up, filled with shot the canon fired.

From the eyebrows of its mistress, its kiss made ballad woeful with

Another lover where they teamed unwillingly in furnace like sighing,

Snail like creeping, face mourning and the morning shining and there satcheled

Goes the schoolboy whining and then home he goes to mother crying.

Aged seven to seventy-seven and the acts, life has parts in many plays

Where it was the main and characterised by drama and early exits as

All actors and both players are merely women and men

Who on their departures, lived their stage in the world, it like you, has.