best at F11
Sonnets
Poet Lariat
PUNCTUALITY
The greatest virtue of the anxious life
is punctuality, being right on time;
married to the hours, ticking clock your wife.
Each day, a changeless rhythm, the same rhyme.
What good, this dulling, repetitious dance ?
Sees not the signs, God’s burning chariot?
Transfixed by time-piece; there’s a likely chance
if brilliant lightening comes it lights you not!
Too busy, self-concerned, to see love’s look
and miss the door that to the garden leads?
Or skim the pages of life’s learned book,
read not the truths on which the mind can feed?
Without a keel, directionless, one blows;
to nowhere, most punctually, one goes.
Poems from the Eighth Decade
Copyright © Harold Macdonald 2004
used with permission