Running With Stars – From The Archives For My Birthday

Today is my 77th birthday.  I never thought I would live this long, being a Type 1 diabetic virtually all of my life.  I  survived a burst appendix in 1965, a heart attack in 1995, a stroke in 2004 and a period of blindness in 2010.   Every morning when I get up I try to leave this world a better place than it is now.

I am nothing
I do not exist
I am invisible
with no Facebook page
no Twitter follows
Does anyone know I’m here?

Hello?

in the vastness
that is space and time
how many thinking beings
have lived and died forgotten?

Contemplate the living billions
few of whom have made a mark;
I count myself as one of them
a clump of earth then soon forgot.

Back when Caesar walked the earth
I’m sure the millions thought the same
never having done great things
so unlike the brave Achilles.

Some of us have dreams no longer,
some incapable of dreams;
As for me I still do dream
while contemplating poetry

to strive to write what others read;
to know myself;
of the City of Ideas
a full citizen be

for in the end
I am a soul
carrying a corpse
someday running with the stars

and if no one remembers these poems
save my children and their children
well then, is that not too
a glorious thing?

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You may read 132 poems I written and put into a book for my grandson starting here:

Invisibles – Poem #1

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