AN AUTUMN POEM

 Inspired by an October journey through Hardanger:

Unlike the seasons with their yearly cyclus of change, we, human beings (if it is not presumptuous to call ourselves that), have but one cyclus.

From birth through the years of youthful discovery, our Primavera. We wander through a wonderland with the confidence of total knowledge based upon the ignorance of the unknown (or that that has yet to become known).

Then the long summer of love and hate, and growing mistrust of our fellow beings. And the discovery that the total knowledge of our youth was an illusion, and we really don't know very much at all.

Our Autumn of slow physical demise, whether the golden age of falling leaves and maturing beauty, or the anguish and foreboding of that that is to come, diluted by nostalgic memories of the richness that life once was, or brooding over lost opportunities and nurturing bitterness.

Then comes our final season; the icy cold winter of demise. Nostalgia torn to pieces and fragmented by dementia, the benevolent prison of the old age home, a friendless, lonely decay and THOSE GOD DAMNED HOSPITAL CLOWNS with their silly fluorescent red noses destroying the last vestiges of our dignity!