We Are Alone
By John Herlihy

You can say what you like
About friendship and love,
About friends and colleagues,
About parents and siblings.
You can think all you like
About the speaker and the listener,
About the father and the son,
About the mother and her daughter.
You can praise whatever you like
About the teacher and the student,
About the man and the woman,
About you and your childhood friends.

We are alone; we are born alone.
We basically live alone and we die alone.
Granted we are cuddled,
Kissed and caressed as infants;
But when we cry, we are alone.
Whether as a baby sucking a thumb in protest,
Or as an old man,
Sucking tobacco smoke on his pipe,
There’s no arguing the fact,
That we are bone dry alone,
Always have been, as if always on loan.

My mother and father,
They are dead and gone.
They couldn’t take me with them,
They left alone,
They left me alone.
My wife, lover, friend,
She grew senile and old.
She no longer remembers,
Our life together of old.
She couldn’t take me with her,
In senility, she hasn’t left yet.
We are alone together,
We are still together, but alone.

When we are alone,
we are a solitary tone.
In a crowd, we are alone.
When we suffer or mourn,
We are alone.
When we teach or give a speech,
We are stone cold alone.
When we sleep,
We experience the little death alone.
When making decisions,
We are alone,
With the choice and its consequence.
When we follow our dreams,
They are our little hoard,
Gathered alone thru the years.
Hopes stored, but still we are alone,
Alone to roam through the heather,
Alone to lay down on the grass,
Alone to pick the poppies,
Alone to drive our jalopies.

When we travel,
We are alone,
Alone to walk through wilderness,
Alone in the narrow valley,
A carpet spread with grasses and sparkling dew.
The daffodils shake their heads at one another;
But we are alone even in their view,
Each one on their own.
I stand there alone looking,
I hear silence all around,
Alone in the silence listening,
But there is no sound,
Silence is all around.

When I write a poem,
I am alone.
An idea comes to me
Without greeting even,
It simply arrives,
Reminding me I feel alone.
I endeavor to explore the idea,
I struggle to find words that endear;
But I am alone,
As if I need to atone.
The rhymes make a splash of sound;
But in the end, they too are alone,
The poem is done, written, gone.
It too has escaped from me,
Leaving me alone.

There is beauty in the knowledge
That we are all alone,
Nothing fancy, just alone.
Let no one tell you otherwise,
Lest you try to compromise,
Pretending to be someone’s lover,
Teacher, friend, even guide.
When truly both now and in the end,
We have no lover, enemy or friend.
We fill in spaces;
We do what we intend, alone.

We are not yet in the future
Because it has not yet arrived.
We are not even in the past
Because the past has just gone by.
We are alone, the first, the last,
Only the silence will proclaim
We were once there with our true name.
But many years from now, no one will care,
Because we are no longer there.
It has taken me a lifetime to realize
That we cannot claim to be alone.
There is a spirit in our breath
That we cannot pretend to own
From our birth until our death.
We are never truly alone,
Not here, not there, not anywhere.