All The Way ~ A Poem by Betsy S. Franz

 

All The Way – A Poem by Betsy S. Franz

Okay

So nothing lasts forever

Your pets will die

Your job will end

Your kids will grow and move away

Your life will end

The world will end

Sure as the nighttime brings an end to every day

 

So surely love can never last

How can anything as delicate and rare

As fragile and as meaningful as love keep growing

And keep shining bright

When even nighttime is ended by the light?

 

So knowing that all things will end

Should we live our life in fear?

Mourning the inevitable end

Of all that we hold dear?

Should we not get too committed

And not get too attached

So we’ll never have to feel

The emptiness and pain that endings bring?

 

We can live this way…

A protected, flat-line life

So when our jobs, our pets, our loves

Come to an end and go away

We can turn, unharmed, and say

“I feel safe. I feel okay. It was just

a dog / a job / a friend

I didn’t love them anyway.”

 

Or we can grab each joy that we can find

And we can leave all fear and doubt behind

And we can love things all the way

And squeeze out all the love and passions these things hold

And fill our lives with all the highs and happy times

That we can find

 

And when they go

We’ll turn, a little bruised, but quite content to say

“God, that was great! It’s sad its gone away,

But at least I got to love it, anyway”

 

For somebody even life will end

And we’ll look back and have the choice to see

A lifetime filled with passion, love and highs and happy times

Or a flat-line life of no love…

but neither misery.

And as we lie there

And our world is turning gray

All the pain we’ve missed in life will hit us hard that day

If we think about it and we find we have to say,

“It’s over now, my life has slipped away.

But it was only life….

I never lived it anyway.”

 

~~  Author’s note: Written in early 1990s, before I learned to live and love all the way.