No Retirement Age for Worries

You went through long periods of neglect and unfair dismissal.
You know how hill-dwellers light torches and beat kerosene tins

to scare away wild elephants ravaging in the backcountry
and you must regret not having stood up for your own people

and not having ended years of your uncalled-for standoff.
You forgot you would wake up to oxen walking in circles

on paddy sheaves on the front yard, to separate grains
from the straw while vacationing at Granny’s winterhouse.

You could have made an existential breakthrough:
how to be cleared of accusations not excepting one’s amnesia!

After your failed efforts, you broke things with a vengeance,
said unnecessary things in the heat of the moment,

took desperate measures seemingly better than slow torture,
and whipped up the death drive as industrial plants do

to the biosphere without bracing for climate change.
To take the pressure off, you might have gone so far

as to greenlight your foolhardiness to harden as permafrost
and to endorse unfounded narratives and relentless polemics

instead of winnowing out inaccuracies the way threshers do
the paddy grains from the chaff falling apart from the pile.

On a Peruvian tour, you might miss eyeblinks for the Nazca Lines
but the life you see around is no less astonishing.

Whenever your resilience is nearing such a breaking point,
play with news headlines like you did in your early teens:

for instance, the tantrum of “an obese turtle on his back
flailing in the hot sun, realizing his time is over.”

Remember fireworks won’t be going off forever in the dark
and unfortunately there’s not even a retirement age for worries.