Forgetting Age

Has the age of forgetting just begun?

I’m glad to forget some things but others

I want to hold on to as if they’ve begun,

as if they’re new, yet familiar, like dawn.

Here comes the age of where-has-it-all-gone,

when I wonder what may have been before:

the color of someone’s eyes, someone who

lived nearby, someone whose name I once knew,

the certain way a dark cloud haunts the sky.

But like the cloud, they’re wisps and mist and last

only long enough to become heavy,

to fall into unknowing. Sweet and small.

I grasp at them. I know they will be missed,

as memory, like soft rain, starts to fall.

— Paul Jones

Paul Jones is the author of Something Wonderful.