Derek Mahon
Consolations of Philosophy
When we start breaking up in the wet darkness
And the rotten boards fall from us, and the ribs
Crack under the constriction of tree-roots
And the seasons slip from the fields unknown to us,
Oh, then there will be the querulous complaining
From citizens who had never dreamt of this--
Who, shaken to the bone in their stout boxes
By the latest bright cars, will not inspect them
And, kept awake by the tremors of new building,
Will not be there to comment. When the broken
Wreath bowls are speckeled with rain-water
And the grass grows wild for want of a caretaker,
There will be time to live through the mind
The lives we might have lived, and get them right;
To lie in silence listening to the wind
Mourn for the living through the livelong night.
Derek Mahon, Selected Poems, Penguin Books, 2006.