I want to tell you about time, how strangely <br />it behaves when you haven't got much of it left: <br />after 60 say, or 70, when you'd think it would <br /> <br />find itself squeezed so hard that like melting <br />ice it would surely begin to shrink, each day <br />looking smaller and smaller - well, it's not so. <br /> <br />The rules change, a single hour can grow huge <br />and quiet, full of reflections like an old river, <br />its slow-turning eddies and whirls showing you <br /> <br />every face of your life in a fluid design - <br />your children for instance, how you see them <br />deepened and changed, not merely by age, but by <br /> <br />time itself, its wide and luminous eye; and you <br />realise at last that your every gift to them - love, <br />your very life, should they need it - will not <br /> <br />and cannot come back; it wasn't a gift at all <br />but a borrowing, a baton for them to pass on in <br />their turn. Look, there they are in this <br /> <br />shimmering distance, rushing through their kind <br />of time, moving faster than you yet not catching up. <br />You're alone. And slowly you begin to discern <br /> <br />the queer outline of what's to come: the bend in <br />the river beyond which, moving steadily, head up <br />(you hope), you will simply vanish from sight.<br /><br />Lauris Dorothy Edmond<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/in-position/
