Grim

Grim

No matter what a man does

To earn his living

To make his way

From birth to his end

From the lowly citizen

To someone of great accomplishment

Or wealth

He should know when it's over

When his successes or failures

Outweigh his need to be

Some will feel proud

What they left behind

Yet he may think on his failures

To reach beyond

To answer the questions

That grow inside him

He could not press to completion

Something in his family or work

Awards may stretch behind him

Friends forecast to amass at his grave

But death's final thought is death

The failure of the body

To keep him on his path

It is this failure that bends his spirit

Could he have done something else

To go on further

To change his world

Whether accident or disease

Death is a failure

And every man reaches it

Beyond it

He may be praised

One or more survivors

Will not celebrate his being

Now released to the ages

And when the earth is torched

By the sun in final flame

All that was man will end

Perhaps spacecraft loaded

With everything created here

Will be launched into voids

To wander into nothing

Only to be destroyed

Before it's discovery and decipherment

All accomplishment gone

Every thought destroyed

This has likely happened

To hundreds or even millions

Of civilizations across the universe

Beings created and civilizations destroyed

No reference or anything left

To show they existed

This writing could be erased days

After I'm gone or before

While science sees farther into space

Those who research must

See these same futures or more

Perhaps it's better never to know

To party every day in total ignorance

Just to celebrate the moments

Of our time and our lives

These words die here

These visions are complete

Resurrection only happens

With new planets

With new life

Discovering all man has found

Feeling the same 

Knowing the same

As different as each eye

That sees the stars overhead

With wandering imaginations

Recreating more language

That will flail the galaxies 

To the ends of their times

To tell the truth

I'm not expert on death

I'm still alive

Ask me in one hundred years

Barry G. Wick