About life passing - by J Green

This poem was shared with me by a dear friend Anthony Green on the passing of his beloved parent. It captures life and living and bonds so well, that I had to share it. 

About life passing

We live
as drops of water
dancing
in a broad river
delighted, 
careless, 
sure of the life
and the movement
and the surging
and the presence
of it all

Absorbed
absorbed
we one day come to feel
our fathers
and our mothers
older than we knew them
feel hints of loss to come
and death, 
and silently taste the passing
of friends we knew
and names we spoke
stand outside houses we could once enter
and look up to see
ourselves
closer to endings
than beginnings

And now we watch our lives
borne onwards
and begin to feel, too, those hints
of so much that has passed
and so little
and taste emptiness
and sense a failure to have built
some small part of all that might be
or might have been
before that river that we were
floods out
as it has always,
into the great sea beyond.

~ Anthony Green, 2007