My Birthday! I Was Here

It was my birthday today
If each year were a second
I'd have been walking this good earth
But a minute since my coming.
I still feel young yet am older than most
The mean life span being but thirty years
Probably less if one includes all the babies conceived
Which are aborted, their eyes to never see
The light of day.
Thus to the vast majority of my fellow humanity
Be they humane or inhumane
I'd seem quite old.
Why I remember when I thought thirty seemed old
God forbid the mention of living to be forty or fifty!
Yet here I am having lived more years than my father
Contemplating my own mortality
Knowing that however many minutes, hours or years I have left
I will not live forever.
Once I am gone what will remain?
Who will ever remember that I once lived?
I am not the son of any God,
Nor even a monster, real or imagined,
So why would anyone remember me?
Nor do I have any children that I know about
Not that I haven't loved.
It is sad that none shall remember me
Since I have loved so many and done much good.
Yet whatever if any cross shall mark my grave
I do not see any kneeling to pray.
Thus I hope that when I'm gone
No tombstone nor marker shall mark my passing
That when future generations look out over the landscape
They shall see a sea or trees, fields and forest
Where once I walked and left nothing in my wake
But these few scribblings
Upon paper writ and pages stacked
Saying, "I was here."

Copyright © 2009 by Terry Lynch. All rights reserved. This poem may be freely copied and distributed in its entirety that perhaps when the author is gone, some part of him may fill another's heart.