"Decades"
Poetry by Michael F. Nyiri
Tuesday, April 12, 2005, 6:17 a.m. pdt
The first decade
Awe inspiring
Waking to the cacophonous
music
of newborn phenomenons
The "firsts" of experience
Walking and talking,
Learning and yearning,
Eating a meal of instantaneous submersion
Attention to detailing the dance of wonder
Childlike babysteps of burgeoning attention
The second decade
Arriving at misbegoten conclusions
Fighting for a meager grasp
of parental freedom
Going one's way
but having to bypass
the obstacles of derisive delusions
Playtime and pulchritude
Passive meanderings
Hormonal misunderstaning
And angsty anger appears
much too often
Graduation from childhood
The third decade
Arriving as an adult in society,
Learning too late
that the first two decades
should have been embraced
more resolutely while
they were happening.
Career minded cares
Love and affection,
Staking a claim for life
Bright skies and dark nights
Experimentation with fulsome fallacy
Marriage for some,
and then:
first decades to experience anew
Fourth decade
brings realizations almost too late
Foreign concepts of aging
and fickle fate
Arriving too soon
Then disappearing from view
For some the cycle
Understandable
And for some the
lessons don't come
Fifth decade
Settling into consistency and boredom
Or implicitly creating one's destiny
Awareness and instability
Errors and terrors of aging arrive
The mirror becomes
one's worst enemy
And as cycles repeat
Time not only won't stop
It quickens with a petulant laugh
The sixth decade
Memory replaces experience
Excitement sometimes evaporates
But small pleasures
Abound in the garden
Physical attraction
to self and others
doesn't seem so important
Undone acts and unseen places
Unborne incomprehension
And nervous laughter at
mortality's message
The seventh decade
Arriving for more and more
Never arriving for some
Contemplation
Eradication of the
memories so important
in the sixth
Elusive mind meanderings
Wisdom courses
through realization
Memory plays tricks
sometimes
The eighth decade and beyond
A journey about to end
Wrinkles on the hands
become the hills and valleys of our lives
stretching into infinity
with the mellow love of God's
final solution
Poetry
2005
