Not long ago, when I was at a dinner, <br />I heard a toast - and here I write it down. <br /> <br />'I had a dream' the speaker said to us <br />'That I had died, and yet I was not dead <br />And there before me lay a final road <br />On which I walked, with neither food nor fire. <br />An empty plain stretched out in all directions <br />With crouching hills, whose tops held up the sky. <br />I walked all day, and yet all day saw nothing - <br />No smoke, no house, no turning right or left. <br />Beside the road there stood, in place of milestones, <br />Some rough-hewn slabs which marked successive graves. <br />I read the worn inscriptions that were on them <br />It seemed that babies had been buried there <br />At two weeks old from birth, at three perhaps, <br />They died, when they had scarcely yet been born. <br />Then as it came to midnight, I encountered <br />An ancient man, his hair as white as snow. <br />He sat beside the road and from a horn <br />Drank strong black wine and nibbled pungent cheese. <br />'Tell me, old man' I put to him a question, <br />'You chew your cheese, you from a horn drink wine. <br />How have you reached so great a length of living <br />Here, where no others live a single year?' <br />He said 'You are mistaken, passing stranger. <br />Here people live into the depths of age. <br />Here in these graves lie men as old as I am. <br />You have misread the funerary inscriptions. <br />We do not count the passing years as you do. <br />We reckon, when we measure length of living, <br />Not years that we have lived, but hours of friendship.'' <br /> <br />At that the speaker stood up from the table - <br />'My friends, now let us drink to years of friendship!' <br />But we were silent. If life's reckoned thus, <br />Perhaps not all of us would live a year!<br /><br />Konstantin Mikhailovich Simonov<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/hours-of-friendship/
