Inscription on a Graveyard Gate

[andave_ya]

We are the Dead; here do we lay,
Forgotten in your mindless day.
You do not know what we have seen,
Sequestered in indifferent dreams!

When we were summoned, our life we left.
Heart's call and duty we gladly kept.
We saw the stars, we touched the moon,
We heard the wild cry of the loon.

When we were young, the world was ours.
We knew it not; the passing hours
Were blossoming with our young-old spring,
Fate hadn't yet aged us with its easily severed string.

The world was ours, the world untouched
Which now doth hurry, swift and rushed,
To some forgotten point; do you, O Traveler,
Know for what you live? 'Ware, Child. Life is an unraveller
Of dreams.

[PrinceMyshkin]

I particularly valued this image:


Fate hadn't yet aged us with its easily severed string.

[Pendragon]

This couplet says it all:



When we were young, the world was ours.
We knew it not; the passing hours


How quickly we squander our youth, which as George Bernard Shaw observed, "Is wasted on the young." That is, the young see it as a time of confinement and cannot wait to grow up, only to realize when they do, that the carefree days of youth are the most precious time we have. Enjoy youth and teenage life and young adulthood for middle age hits suddenly like a brick, and then old age comes like a killing frost and we wonder who the person in the mirror really is! ;) :) (Middle-aged Pen!) :p

[andave_ya]

Thank you, gentlemen. PrinceMyshkin, that line was the hardest to figure out, and I'm still not entirely happy with it, but I'm glad you are.

Pen, you are eternally young. I think my poem kind of creeped my Mom out; when she heard it she looked at me and said, "It's good, but an old person should have written it. Like someone about to die.

[Ace]

I have written this before, and I will write it again:

I am no good at commenting others' work, but I need to post something in reply to this poem.

In other words, thank you for sharing it because I enjoyed it. :p