Happiness

[greenstorm]

Happiness Is The Art of Being Broken

Happiness is the art of being broken
With least sound. The old, whom circumstance
Has ground smooth as green bottle-glass
On the sea’s furious grindstone, very often
Practise it to perfection. (For them, death
Is the one definitive shrug
In an infinite series, all prior gestures
Take relevance from this, as much express
Sorrow for stiff canary or cold son.)

Always the first fragmentation
Stirs us to fear… Beyond that point
We learn where we belong, in what uncaring
Complex depths we roll, lashed by light,
Tumbling in anemone-dazzled fathoms
Seek innocence in surrender,
Senility an ironic act of charity
Easing the agony of disparateness until
That day when, all identity lost, we serve
As curios for children roaming beaches,
Makeshift monocles through which they view
The same green transitory world we also knew.

Bruce Dawe

Comments

[dunfalach.livejournal.com]

That's a very....non-triumphant view of aging. The final years are all very bad but with any luck you'll be too senile to know. And the children are only happy because they're too young to know how pointless the world really is.

In contrast, I was watching a Howard and Vestal Goodman tribute Sunday. Watching Howard through Gaither Homecoming videos that were spread over many years, he always reminded me of Tolkein's elves...their bodies wearing into a thin veneer till they could no longer contain the living fire of their spirit. There is such a beautiful and honest joy shining through that man's face in every video that I can recall seeing him in.