Legacy

A short poem about what legacy means.

What maketh a man?
Is it his acts or thoughts?
Is it the trail he left...
or the things he bought.

Is it the works he's made
or monuments built to him?
Is it his name etched in books
or lauded loudly in a hymn.

Be it his visage left in stone
or painted on a wall alone?
Or better still...just his name...
chiseled into marble stone.

Or shall we judge by this -
the sum total of his lineage
or perhaps by the many laws
graced by his noble signage.

The truth is none of these..
For it's nothing material
the worth of man or woman
is something more ethereal

In my home, on a shelf doth sit
a stone vassal - of small merit
And within this cask is merely
ash and silt long ago set.

No words are engraved at all
on it's white marble face.
And of it's simple contents
there be no mention or trace.

Yet as sure as rain and fire
deep within my heart and brain...
Something to this day ..
bravely and defiantly remains.

The hands who lifted me up
when as a child I often fell
of the warm and loving voice
great bedtime tales he would tell.

Those feet whose long strides
my small feet followed on the path
whose twinkling eyes glimmered
when ever he made us laugh.

How he smiled that one smile
and on to the end.
Whose very love and care
made my brother and I men.

"So what maketh man?"
friends, tis merely this
the hearts in which you live
and tears of those who miss.

For that stone urn is a lie
it holds nothing for what I care.
For in my tears and smiles
Ah...the man - he lives there.

Author's Note

New poet here.. Hope you enjoy.

Reviews

[Gee]

I doubt many will be remembered beyond the generation they have sired. Well end up a name on a stone read every now and again by curious strangers

[KC]

love this! this is so good.