There are no answers to your questionings; <br />If eighty years have not revealed the truth, <br />Then how could I, this child of your imaginings <br />Begin to comprehend your loss of youth. <br /> <br />Perhaps you let it slip and lose all meaning <br />When time last yawned, and you did fall asleep, <br />Then youth took flight while you stayed still and dreaming <br />Within some sepia’d year you once did keep. <br /> <br />Wild eyed and worn, you always look about you <br />And wonder what dismay has brought to this, <br />The thread of age has tied and bound and caught you <br />And thoughts of death now tremble at your lip. <br /> <br />But yet, your youth may still be seen and found there <br />Way back beside an old welsh village pit <br />Where long dead miners carol ‘Men of Harlech’, <br />And fresh young girls in neat white pinnies sit; <br /> <br />To wait the miners singing at the darkness, <br />To wait the steelmen, wandering from the shift, <br />Until your brothers chaff you in the moonlight <br />And you go in, sit by the hearth, and sleep. <br /> <br />There are no questions now that I can answer, <br />There are no harvests left for us to reap, <br />For youth is spent and wasted on a moment <br />And age is all that we have left to keep. <br /> <br />9 October 1993<br /><br />David Lewis Paget<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/on-my-mother-s-80th/
