Belated Poem for My Birthday
1
Though life is short
I continue to have birthdays
(Pardon please this vain defiance)
My children are now the age of my dreams
My grandchildren defy gravity
The lives I have assisted into being
Do not belong to me
The irretrievable is unforgiving
But memory remains fragrant nevertheless
Keeping lost pleasure fresh
What I no longer possess I can spare
I will learn to spare what remains
The future a narrowing pavement
The past an endless twine
Each night my last my only
Two lives for each of us
The one perceived by others
The other one you know
Which do you call your own
Which face the mirror in your hand
Evil is always prosaic
Truth is made precious by lies
2
Now on the cusp of my ultimate deprivation
Death ready to bear witness
I assemble my armies of words
I take credit for nothing
I thrive on the natural
Hypocrisy of my race
I am the inhabitant of echoes
My conversation a halo round a wound
I beat the bushes for my youth
Stolen while I napped
Speak to me from among the living
From a childhood grown thin and faint
Let me hear its whiny plaint
Across my Bay’s long nave
Where the smooth-faced sailors played
And innocence awash in sunlight
Thought wit brave
I have been a knave
The rest has been repentance
4/24/00, 5/19-5/23/00
Copyright 2000 by Maurice Leiter
Reprinted with permission.
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