There was a father and his son, wandering round in the forest;
The former was an old poet, he saw the latter looking fussed,
‘What does life mean’, the boy asked him. ‘Why do you write, how do you cope?’
‘Life is a slope’, the father said, ‘all that can make us climb is hope.’
‘We call ourselves what we are not, we profess immortality
That we are more than a blunt skin, not conceiving its brevity
We call ourselves masters of life, claim we are not afraid of death
But in the dark that’s all we dread, as we tremble to our last breath.
Our falling hands on the keyboard might make some words in the shadows
Hoping in vain to see the light and pretending to be maestros,
To write in pain some pretty song, with a sweet and happy ending,
Like a poem, a pretty one, in which what we do has meaning.
And then one day, one fateful day, we close our eyes for the last time,
There’ll be flowers, there’ll be people wondering why it doesn’t rhyme.
Wondering why –oh god say why– we shake and cry and fly and die;
“What is this song, what is this verse, in which all we do is awry.
Is there a god, is there a hell in this dark joke, this blood-soaked tune
Where is our goal, our great purpose”; as we seek answers in the moon.
There is no more to it than that’, he told his son as he crumbled,
‘We are nothing, yet we are all’, he went on as some tears trickled.
