Before and after thee, an infinity.
Life but a momentary thing
That dissolves in eternity.
Applause and glory, misbegotten,
Your memory long forgotten.

The directing mind alone a divinity.
The body a loathsome encumbrance.
To benefit others the nitty-gritty —
Everything else a wide circumference.

Dedicate your life to others, the mantra.
Dismiss pleasure and pain, a recanter.
Come back to the inner mind, a sanctuary.
Remember the one purpose eleemosynary.

He wrote to himself not to forget,
Keep to the singular purpose dead set.
The brightest star in the night sky, Sirius,
That’s the immortal Marcus Aurelius.

All poetry — Henry Barnard

My Story

You have heard the awful stories recounted many times.  Someone loses control to road rage and shoots and kills another driver or some variation with the same outcome — one man, incensed, murders another, a total stranger, with no reasonable justification.

And our common reaction to this scenario is stark horror that anyone could be so cruel as to willfully murder a perfect stranger that way.  But I would submit the murderer is also a victim here.  The roads are really a disaster lying in wait for the next impatient driver, and we are all that impatient driver — we are all in a hurry to get where we are going fast, and yet the roads are often filled beyond their capacity, particularly at rush hour.  So they are a trap waiting in the wings for all of us — we are all susceptible to being swept away…

Old age —
The sunken eyes, the knotted brow,
A bony body chained in a cage
Limps about like a withered sow.

You have seen the years fly away,
And friends and lovers no longer attend,
But memories, they abound and stay.
Your reckoning? Not a merry end.

Youth’s beauty has long since gone,
Yet your eyes, they still dance to song!
So a furtive sparkle still appears
In this ancient face despite the years.

All Poetry — Henry Barnard

My Story

I was only 15 years old but adventurous — what 15-year old isn’t?  We were all sailors.  Twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the yacht club would hold races for a fleet of Beetlecats to go round buoys on Waquoit Bay on Cape Cod — a large, 3-by-1 mile bay that lets out through a rocky jetty to Vineyard Sound.  I say “we” because my buddy, Jimmy Johnson, used to crew for me in those races.  We were a team.

That bay, though large, was extremely safe, as there were few locations on the bay that were deep, and all locations were very visible to the surrounding houses, but mostly because it wasn’t the real ocean — which lay just beyond the rocky jetty.  The ocean was where unpredictable and potentially dangerous things happened, but the bay was “safe” or so it seemed.

I got the idea one day…