Wordsworth, Horace and Pindar)
Which one of us dare say that you are old?
Which one so careless of the woes of men
That he (or in this anti-sexist ode, a she) so bold
Would venture to suggest your five times ten
Mean less than this: the best is yet to come.
And we, your choir (not quite) invisible
Sing out with fervent hope you’ll not succumb
To slings or arrows or outrageous fortune’s visible
Detractions from the glory of your life’s great sum,
Which being greater than its parts is indivisible.
Some say life starts at forty, as if life were a cliché
Not demanding of our full attention always.
But we know more and have no need to pray
We’ll only live through tales of once and future days.
Our time is now. We will rejoice in carpe diem like the fool
Who never woke the morning after nights before
The stupid days we misspent youth in life’s hard school
Where all we’ve known and all, that vast much more,
We long ago forgot or set aside like life’s lost tool
Has led to here: the precipice from which we soar.
So not for us some melancholic meditation
On the mist and mellow fruitfulness of age.
These are the baby-boomer days of celebration
And we, the rag-tag generation who maintain the rage
About much more than just the fading of a light
At some unspecified and yet still distant point
We know we’ll one day reach to lose, at last, the fight
Rave on (as ‘Van the Man’, we did our seer anoint,
Impels us) get down and dirty, boogie on, delight
In sex ‘n drugs ‘n rock ‘n roll and, ageing girl, wreck the joint!
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