top of page
Fifty Years from Now
by Roger Howard
Fifty years from now
I plan to be lost for a while,
grateful for all the lives
I no longer have to live.
My chemistry,
and the salts of my smile
will ripen with the universe
and I will taste, at last,
the raw stuff of the cosmos.
I will see the clarity of darkness
and, like Don Quixote,
I will not spend my time
separating what is real
from what is not,
for there is no difference in our hearts.
Like Santiago, I will row
across the Southern sky.
Orion, bright Sirius
and all the Pleiades
will be my comfort in the night
and Electra my sustenance and my light.
And I will meet Ulysses
on the shore of the Happy Isles
where I will bathe in the warmth of those companions
Circe has undone.
Fifty years from now
I will harden sail against
the solar winds
and dust the planets
with my wake
to gather Queequeg
and Ahab from their
oceanic seclusion.
All will be quiet.
Only the poets
will be given the privilege of voice,
for the essential things
are too invisible for common words to see.
Yet, in an instant,
one half century
will have come and gone,
as an eclipse darkens and blanches
against the light.
I cannot wait.
Roger Howard is a retired general surgeon who has relocated to the Clearwater, FL area. He has taken writing classes at The Gotham Writer’s Workshop in New York City and has been writing poetry for 10 years. He tries to use poetry to capture moments and scenes in life as an artist might use a canvas, recalling that what is essential is often invisible to the eye. His poems have been published in ODET, a Tampa Bay literary journal and in the periodical The Senior Voice. The poem he continually comes back to for reflection and inspiration is “Ulysses” by Alfred Lord Tennyson.
Read More...
bottom of page