A hundred years is a lot of living <br />I've often thought. and I'll know, maybe, <br />Some day if the gods are good in giving, <br />And grant me to turn the century. <br />Yet in all my eighty years of being <br />I've never known but one ancient man <br />Who actively feeling, hearing, seeing, <br />Survived t beyond the hundred span. <br /> <br />Thinking? No, I don't guess he pondered; <br />He had the brains of a tiny tot, <br />And in his mind he so often wandered, <br />I doubted him capable of thought. <br />He hadn't much to think of anyway, <br />There in the village of his birth, <br />Painfully poor in a pinching penny-way, <br />And grimed with the soiling of Mother Earth. <br /> <br />Then one day motoring past his cottage, <br />The hovel in which he had been born, <br />I saw him supping a mess of pottage, <br />on the sill door, so fail forlorn. <br />Thinks I: I'll give him a joy that's thrilling, <br />A spin in my open Cadillac; <br />And so I asked him, and he was willing, <br />And I installed him there in the back. <br /> <br />en I put the big bus through its paces, <br />A hundred miles an hour or more; <br />And he clutched at me with queer grimaces, <br />(He's never been in a car before.) <br />The motor roared and the road was level, <br />The old chap laughed like an impish boy, <br />And as I drove like the very devil, <br />Darn him! he peed his pants with joy. <br /> <br />And so I crowned his long existence <br />By showing him how our modern speed <br />Easily can annihilate distance, <br />And answer to all our modern need. <br />And I went on my way but little caring, <br />Until I heard to mild dismay, <br />His drive had thrilled him beyond all bearing . . . <br />The poor old devil! - He died next day.<br /><br />Robert William Service<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/my-centenarian/
