1986-01-28 Challenger down

Challenger down

A look at our mortality again today.
Life and death, spirits and love, all together.

Something in me can almost grasp it, sometimes.
The faces and hopes of these people,
their purpose and joy, their lives and deaths.

Sometimes I think we’re here,
just cattle in God’s pens.
We move, we feel, we birth, we love
but still die for purposes
far beyond our small understanding.

The best of what we love and what we are
seem so intense and so transient, at once.

The best of us die without apparent purpose,
without explanation.
I can almost grasp it … maybe I will
before I am driven from the stage too.

I hope our choices and actions
are not just empty gestures
against death’s apparent caprice.

gallagher
28 Jan 86
Irvine

— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —

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