I've always known but never quite believed
that I would die and so I've never grieved
an umimaginably distant end
but now I'm old and know my time is short
it seems a most illuminating thought.

The prospect of annihilation tends
to dim the rosy lighting memory lends
to efforts and achievements highlighted
by wishful thinking - what was life about
and what remains when all the lights go out ?

So much that bulked important at the time
in retrospect seems farce or pantomime
with stereotypic characters and plot
stuttering to an undramatic close
of anti-climax wrapped in tragic pose.

Religion claims to offer a way through
the darkness ( though these days the Christian queue
upon the path is not as long as some)
but flickering candle shadows still create
caverns where superstitions lie in wait;

and answers given by theology
confuse with abstract terminology,
raising new questions to explain the old;
then unconvincing theories only leave
faith as the trumping ace tucked up the sleeve.

As gamblers sitting round the circled glow
that floods the table we can never know
for sure the bluff from real and make our play,
crossing our fingers and our breasts in hope
that, even if we lose, we still can cope.

What of the explanations science brings
to countless age-old questionings,
demoting commonsense and old wives' tales
in favour of experimental ways
and data in the glare of public gaze?

Now evolution, atoms, gravity
concede to scientific method, we
can train the scientific searchlight on
the gloom and mystery of human death
and try to make some sense of shibboleth.

With all the power science can provide
it surely must be able to decide
whether eternal life is fantasy
and so religious fraud or whether Man
evolved a Soul somewhere in Nature's plan.

With or without a soul it's my belief
that time in general is not a thief -
it makes its bargain with us through our genes
since births contract repayment at our ends
of all the atoms nature only lends.

And when the sun expands in years to come
and swallows up the planets one by one,
the Earth itself cannot avoid its fate:
all life will perish - animals, plants, men -
one last illumination ! And what then ?