Cracking The Code

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber

What is life all about? Why are we here at all? Well, who really cares about why?

Me, I feel we should make the most of life as it comes, take the bad with the good and try to come through it all a better person.

If I had to point to just one reason for living, it would have to be love. I guess that's why I have written so many poems about love, loving and being loved.

CRACKING THE CODE

Come a time we die, who’ll know
or care (for long) that once we walked
this earth, whose mother gave birth
to this or that child-person as likely as not
spending a lifetime seeking answers
to questions where there are none, love
taunted by tales of make-believe,
peace where there’s but pain for knowing
how things might have been
but for those wasted chances, missed
opportunities, wrong calls
as a loaded dice falls on ego’s gaming board,
lost chords of pretty songs intended
to make rights out of petty wrongs (and worse)
but merely adding fuel to flames
erasing names from movie tapes of memory
wherein we can love, live forever?

Let it be said, once we're dead and gone,
here's living proof of people walking the Earth,
giving water-birth to brave worlds of words,
never quite grasped for principle or purpose
ghosts lending creativity to the mind
and tongue (hopefully, someone ‘staking
the trouble to write it down for others
to make sense, crack the code, even learn
from our mistakes, replace a lost chord
or two, redefine the fragility of happiness
as variations on a theme of loneliness

Be humanity selfish, selfless, false or true,
flowers of the forest made to cry …
blessed am I whose life brought me to you
and you to me though, yes, we die

Copyright R. N. Taber 2005; 2010

[Note: This poem has been  slightly but significantly revised from the original as it appears in 1st eds. of A Feeling For The Quickness Of Time by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2005; 2nd ed. in preparation.]