Forty-Three

Music: Serenade for Strings.
By Antonin Dvorak.
Performed by The Advent Chamber Orchestra at The Free Music Archive
under a Creative Commons Attribution/ShareAlike license.

Forty-three sustains his love of life,
Old enough to know what he must do.
Responsibilities have come with age,
The burden and the blessing of this stage,
Yielding joys less pure than those he knew.

There are the distant child and former wife,
Hard truths that no resentment can assuage.
Retired parents soon will need him, too,
Encumbering him on both sides as the view
Encompasses more grace than he can gauge.