I's been quite a while, but it returns to memory every so often, at those iffy moments when you are almost tempted to loosen the grip on it all, yielding to small but painful defeats, uncertainties, indifferences, injustices.
And yet I've lived, I live, you've lived - we shall live.
You've Lived
All through the play, Hamlet's
Looking for some hold in the world.
All through it, he's searching for something in life
To bear the weight of his being
And neither his father's murder,
The adultery of his mother
Nor Ophelia's love --
Things shattering enough
One would have thought --
Is sufficient to root him
In the rank, unweeded garden
Which was what he called life.
He was here without an anchor
In a fruitless sea of being.
And he never evolved an interest
(As we say) 'to keep him going' --
He, with his wayward life; he, the lost one.
So take comfort --
Even if you only grow onions,
Breed rabbits or put ships in bottles,
If that grips you, you are one of the saved,
The light shines on you, you can fear death,
Go in dread of the end.
That is to say, you've lived.
Gwyn Thomas
Photo: Jim Brandenburg
