I saw you against the backdrop of poverty,
As you jubilantly saw yourself,
No milieu can you easily envisage,
Except as it might enhance the fantasy,
For surely,
This is what your life has become.

The decades have passed,
The routines are the same,
The accoutrements are light years
From where you began.
It is difficult to see
Through your life-giving dreams,
How God’s lessons
Are what you have missed.

The surgeon’s knife has brought you
The desires of your heart,
But only in a minimalist way,
For there is nothing in this world,
No procedure or pill,
Which keeps the ravages of the years
Away.

You are drowning
In a sea of cosmetics,
Quicksand for the narcissist few,
Not even Ponce de Leon can save you now;
Not surgery,
Not hormone,
Not mystical witch’s brew.

It is delightful to observe
The dignity, of those who age ever gracefully,
Not consumed with any superficial beauty,
Which in their own mirror
May have previously seen.
They are humbly proud,
Rather,
In who they have, over the long years become,
Their children and grandchildren
Are a tribute to them,
So too, the good things they have done.

But there you stand so arrogantly,
Anticipating the downfall
Which pride almost always certainly precedes,
But for now cast among
This poverty,
You appear wealthy,
Striking,
And young.

Beware the Reaper, proud one,
And the stench which announces his arrival,
Decomposing flesh, the harbinger of death,
For none can assure your survival.
So you dance the ante-mortem ladder
On frail limbs,
Surely it is comedy and tragedy the same,
But none so solemn as in sepulcher displayed,
Hands folded avaricious old rose,
Post-mortem rigor has captured the dame.

Accept your fate, lost vixen,
For beauty is of strained value
In the latest decades of life.
Recapture the hope
Borne of inner-goodness;
Generosity and forgiveness,
A love of God,
And life,
A plea for exculpation,
So the Spirit might carry you home.