The Best Years of Our Lives

 

My best for years

Wasn’t nearly enough

I’m slouching toward Jerusalem

The holy city where the ages crash

Enough of sailing to Byzantium

That fell so long ago

 

With what is left

The modern age done years back

What does one call the next age

But the next age, as we have done?

No more girls in water

Sparking epiphanies (ironically through

water)

No more women beating men

To vote to have

The rudiments of politics

And understanding

I think they should rule—the

Women, not the politics

 

New happens with each day

There’s always change

Those who say there’s not

Who want all angles to be retrograde

Know nothing of the physics,

The inevitability of slopes that go

The other way

And energy with them

 

Africa is where the church is growing

And south of South America

Parts of India and Asia, even though

(please, not because)

It’s beaten down

Atheism rises, and why not?

Though I think agnosticism steers

The ship of state

Searching for a port

It knows is there

 

I think formlessness might be

The way,

Since doctrine has been brutal

In its application

And a ruthless form of righteousness

Where is love,

The orphan asked

He sung

And she responded

It is all around you,

Though mortality can end it all

It appears, my dear

 

Therefore go for what is real

Hold on, though not so tightly

The goodness cannot breathe

 

C L Couch

 

 

(title from the movie directed by William Wyler

Yeats is also relied on at the beginning

a musical toward the ending)

 

Photo by Fazel on Unsplash

Mazandaran Province, Unnamed Road, Iran