- In the Loneliness of the Night -

By John Herlihy

He sometimes took himself out into the distant hills,

Where he could lose himself in the loneliness of the night.

Noise-some lights of the city increase feeling of the blues,

The night holds no fear for him anymore, given up its fright.

The reason being that he had now come to be grown old,

Age has slowed him down with no real sense of urgency.

The better part of his life’s story has already been told,

What time left to live takes on a great sense of poignancy.

Strange how age has a way of slowly creeping up on us,

Before we know what happened, the mirror image changed.

People perhaps show a little more respect and make a fuss,

The person he was in his youth now seems a little estranged.

In the hills at night, a man can sort out what’s on his mind,

One clear message of old age being what little time still left.

The urgency of youth has taken on an urgency of another kind,

The body weakened, the mind forgetful, strong a sense of death.

The hills, the darkness, the night, a man alone can think clearly;

When a man thinks the end is near, many things to think about.

Not the least of which all those things that he once held dearly,

And certainly not all those things that had filled him with doubt.

He sat himself down on a smooth rock and surveyed the city below.

He pondered how life goes on with all its harsh trials and tribulation.

Time now to take stock and consider what life still had to bestow.

He expected to be surprised that blessings exist in this final station.

He thought of life and death, joy and sorrow, and life’s temptations,

Obligations to ourselves and to God, their contentment and regret.

 At every step of the way, how he dealt with his many frustrations,

So many things just left unaccomplished, so many things to forget.

He knew that the loneliness of the night would keep its own counsel,

Its silence as gold, that spoke volumes he would never to anyone reveal.

Whatever left unloved or undone is now considered inconsequential;

With so little time left and so little left to do, there’s not much to steal.

I listened to what the old man had to say and hardly paused for breath;

I knew he had a lot of time to think of things in ways of pure imagining.

Who knows but the day will surely come for our own Impending death;

What the old man said made perfect sense, amounted to good listening.

“I will tell you what I did see,” he finally said, “a sight worth witnessing.”

I looked deep into his weary eyes, as if his words flashed an image therein.

The old man gazed off into the far distance as if there was no one listening;

He nodded his head, blinked his eyes, his mouth held firm a faint little grin.

“I saw for one brief moment a man wrapped in light with strange powers;

His wings, neatly folded down, opened as a fan in all their feathered grace.

As if the door of eternity momentarily opened with the passing of the hours;

A beatific vision of such peaceful serenity did adorn the archangel’s face.”

No doubt, feelings of the end filled his heart with a dream-like remembrance;

Indeed, as I listened to the old man’s words, his face took on a strange light.

A transformation took place as the old man recalled this angelic resemblance;

I looked at the nearby hills around me but saw only the loneliness of the night.

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(c) John Herlihy January 2019