Waking After Yeats

Old men often wake too late to recall

their long-sailed dreams. The brevity of youth,

that tomorrow that never came, in the fall

becomes the sorrow of an age-old truth --

Death is the constant companion of Life.

Time does not excuse the unadventurous

from the ravages of late-night atonement --

a day lost, is a day squandered, relinquish

of Eos’ per diem endowment …

Drifting asea, too afar from Fyfe,

Yeats’ silver-haired lament of stateless ships

sullenly tugs at the fraying cuffs of

my checkered past, so many fruitless daytrips --

reminding how skint I’ve been in paying for love …

 

Constantinople is a beach I’ll never breach --

Kassia’s dream will forever remain just out of reach.

 

Ater Yeats, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’

Ken e Bujold

 

Reviews

[Michael Sun Bear]

Hello Ken, I have been reading some of your work here. I think I can say you are the most well read, intellectual poet I have come across in the Cafe. This is a sad, sad poem. I am in the final stage of life. I can look back and claim many a day, many an opportunity squandered, yet I do not punish myself for the failures of being human. And when it comes for paying for love I have paid dearly, far from skint. I squandered a few opportunities at love, but seized the ones that mattered, but the cost has been high. Anyway, thank you for your unique contributions.

[Perdition]

Well, once again, awed and thrown to waves asunder...one be life the other alchemy of loss. Let me see if I can rap this up quickly..lol. You've said everything, and quite eloquent as always. To waste a second is to know the dagger comes to us later. These are the things they do not teach when young, but rather the things earned in the experience of life, and women come well to teach at times...sometimes brick walls do just as well. Hopefully, we pick up the stone and walk that hill or mile with a madman's yowl, Wonderful to read again your poetry~,

[Kelly Scheppers]

Your title snared my attention. Good reading as always. Glad I took the bait.